snippet plugin fails when being run in a non-utf8 locale

When gedit is run with a non-utf8 locale, for example when being run in a quilt shell, the following is spewed on the console:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/windowactivatable.py", line 57, in do_activate
    self.accel_group = Library().get_accel_group(None)
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/library.py", line 878, in get_accel_group
    self.ensure(language)
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/library.py", line 912, in ensure
    self.ensure_files()
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/library.py", line 934, in ensure_files
    self.add_system_library)
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/library.py", line 854, in find_libraries
    addcb(f)
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/library.py", line 838, in add_system_library
    return self.add_library(library)
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/library.py", line 794, in add_library
    library.ensure_language()
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/library.py", line 523, in ensure_language
    for element in self.parse_xml(256):
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/library.py", line 467, in parse_xml
    data = f.read(readsize)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
    return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 1967: ordinal not in range(128)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gedit/plugins/snippets/windowactivatable.py", line 71, in do_deactivate
    if self.accel_group:
AttributeError: 'WindowActivatable' object has no attribute 'accel_group'