This patch should make gettext return unicode, which is what freetype expects (also explicitly set in the same file). It makes translations that support non-ascii *and* non-unicode encodings, such as latin 1 for western european languages, draw correctly. The problem only occurs for platforms where those encodings are default, i.e. in Linux if /etc/locale.gen looks like this: sv_SE ISO-8859-15 If it were to read UTF-8 this patch doesn't change the behaviour at all. This is probably the case for Mac OS X and perhaps Windows.