You can change global settings by editing /etc/sysconfig/i18n.
Replace
UTF-8 with ISO-8859-15. If you have no need for other than Western
characters this will do. I was thinking about doing this myself, because
this UTF-8 encoding only makes my system slower, and I don't use other
characters than Western anywhere.
I tried that and then it work under X, but under console the messages
are now in english....
May you send me your /etc/sysconfig/i18n file
regards