Comment 3 for bug 156676

Launchpad uses standard English quotation marks because Launchpad is presented in English. They are not US-centric; on the contrary, using only ASCII symbols *would* be US-centric (the A in ASCII is for American). We may localize Launchpad into other languages in the future, in which case quoted passages would use «…» or „…“ or whatever other (similarly non-ASCII) symbols are appropriate for the given language.

The characters are standard Unicode, so this is a problem with emacs, not with Launchpad. I suggest reporting a bug in the bug tracker for your version of emacs.