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Joomla 1.5 should make a lot of this moot but it's at RC1 and we had to deliver a multi-lingual 1.0.13 site now. We needed a 11 language payload, including Japanese and Russian apart from the smattering of European languages. Given the variety of character sets, UTF-8 was the only way to handle all the languages within one Joomla instance.
There are plenty of articles describing how to set up Joomla 1.0.x for UTF-8 usage (http://www.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,33/p,86/ is a good example). However, the sting in the tail is finding or creating the UTF-8 language files. For some languages it's easy they are directly downloadable from the extensions site. Others took rather more work.
The best solution we found was to use Editpad Pro (http://www.editpadpro.com/unicode.html) which is fantastic at not only converting to UTF-8 but also correcting the encoding in the actual translation files you download. Using Editpad Pro we were able to correct the Russian language file to Windows 1251 (Cyrillic) before going to UTF-8. This neatly got rid of all the strange characters we were seeing before.
To save others the grief, here's our UTF-8 Russian file:  joomla_1.0.12_russian_frontend
And here are a few others:
We are using the excellent Joom!fish component to manage all the content translations across the language set.
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