My initial guess would be that something in your locale configuration needs to be adjusted for the proper UTF character set. I was reading something about this recently in the Gentoo configuration documentation and it indicated a few things you needed to do to get applications to work properly with different character sets, though I don't recall the exact details.
Here is a
link to their UTF-8 document, which gets into a lot of details about UTF support versus standard ASCII and it might shed some light on the subject. Just substitute your local character set for UTF-8. It also references the Locale guide which has more information, but is more geared towards how to pick the customization and use local currency symbols, etc.