Hm, I don't wanna close that as works for me, but as a matter of fact it does:
[tobias@baxter coding]$ pacman -Qi gettext
Name : gettext
Version : 0.15-1
Groups : None
Packager : Arch Linux (http://www.archlinux.org)
URL : http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext
License : None
Architecture : i686
Size : 5463442
Build Date : Wed Oct 25 17:57:05 2006 UTC
Install Date : Thu Oct 26 16:05:54 2006 UTC
Install Script : No
Reason: : explicitly installed
Provides : None
Depends On : gcc
Required By : perl-libintl-perl sharutils
Conflicts With : None
Description : GNU internationalization library

[tobias@baxter coding]$ blender
Compiled with Python version 2.4.
Checking for installed Python... got it!
could not change language to en_US nor en_US.UTF-8
Saved session recovery to /tmp/quit.blend

Blender quit
[tobias@baxter coding]$

So any confirms or no confirms with this bug?

2 more days and I close with works for me.

My apologies. When I posted this it didn't work on Arch64. I should have mentioned this.

Since I have your ear, ftgl needs to be added to the dependencies list on the package build.

Hehe, fair enough.
FTGL used to be a dependency of blender, but a couple of releases ago they included their own heavily tweaked ftgl sources into blender source tree. The makefiles are set up to use them and I have no sign that this behavior has changed. The libs should be statically linked into the blender binary. Without ftgl blender shouldn't be able to display the internationalized GUI with AAed fonts which it does fine on my box.
Do you have any more info on that issue?

This is the final output before it blew up. Installing FTGL allowed me to successfully build:

Compiling ==> 'FTF_Api.cpp'
In file included from source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_Api.cpp:44:
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:40:28: error: FTGLPixmapFont.h: No such file or directory
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:41:29: error: FTGLTextureFont.h: No such file or directory
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:115: error: ISO C++ forbids declaration of 'FTFont' with no type
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:115: error: expected ';' before '*' token
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:117: error: ISO C++ forbids declaration of 'FTFont' with no type
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:117: error: expected ';' before '*' token
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:118: error: ISO C++ forbids declaration of 'FTFont' with no type
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:118: error: expected ';' before '*' token
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:119: error: ISO C++ forbids declaration of 'FTFont' with no type
source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_TTFont.h:119: error: expected ';' before '*' token
scons: *** [/home/skottish/downloads/blender/src/build/linux2/source/blender/ftfont/intern/FTF_Api.o] Error 1
scons: building terminated because of errors.
==> ERROR: Build Failed. Aborting...

OK, I'm sure this is on arch64 only, which apparantly needs scons to build, and the scons setup defaults to a system FTGL and not blenders internal which ashould be preferred. I point this on to Andy (the 64 maintainer).

For Andy:
Andy, I still don't get satisfying results when I build with scons since the makefiles seem to be better maintained so for a while I like to keep the messy build mix around. Not pretty, I know.
Please have a look at the FTGL stuff, I don't mind to make it a makedepends(as it affects only me as the builder and the makefiles point to the internal FTGL stuff) but from what I remember reading about it, For blender the internal FTGL should be preferred, since otherwise the results seem to be not optimal. It ends up as statically linked in blender anyway.