Converting text file to different encoding.

Fri Apr 17 09:19:48 EDT 2015

I am having few files in default encoding. I wanted to change their encodings, 
preferably in "UTF-8", or may be from one encoding to any other encoding. 
I was trying it as follows,
 >>> import codecs
 >>> sourceEncoding = "iso-8859-1"
 >>> targetEncoding = "utf-8"
 >>> source = open("source1","w")
 >>> target = open("target", "w")
 >>> target.write(unicode(source, sourceEncoding).encode(targetEncoding))
but it was giving me error as follows,
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
 target.write(unicode(source, sourceEncoding).encode(targetEncoding))
TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, file found
If anybody may kindly suggest how may I solve it. 
Regards,
Subhabrata Banerjee.