Hi Jiří, hi Daniel, I had the same problem: the localized package descriptions had question marks instead of German umlauts in a non-UTF-8 terminal. It seems I've found the culprit: there is a line with
export MM_CHARSET=ISO-8859-1
in my .bashrc, put in by language-env years ago. After unsetting
MM_CHARSET aptitude displayed the national characters just fine.
Hope this helps,
Sven
