Thank you Terry! I was trying to follow the documentation but somehow didn't payed attention to the lgettext/gettext distinction until I read your first response. Changing lgettext to gettext solved the problem.
It prints correctly to my console because I have to environmental variable PYTHONIOENCODING set to utf8, which is what my console emulator uses. But that's actually not necessary in my original application (it has a web interface), just for this isolated test. I really should have separated the call to print() as you suggested tough, if only to make the problem clearer. As for the "multiple different limited national encodings" vs "everything as UTF-8", I agree with you and am definitely going for the latter because the former seems to be unnecessarily complicated. Thanks again for the help! Problem solved.
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