Why is this in english you wonder, well maybe someone NON swedish reads this and he/she might in the future be able to tech a swede how this is done! (and i don't have swedish chars in my editor;-D)
First off I might mention that I already have setup swedish chars in console and there are other HOWTOs explaining that one! And I can only speak for BitchX versions 68-71 since thoose are the only ones I've used! I compiled BitchX-70 after some changes to include/config.h the one important to swedish charset is to make sure that the EMACS_KEYBINDINGS is "#undef "'ed and not "#define"'ed. When compiled and installed I atleast got some charakters to show when I used swedish chars, so I used "setfont" and loaded a latin1 font and it worked! Swedish chars showed up! The problem was that it showed lots of swedish chars where it shouldn't! I solved this by downloading cse.tar.gz, a great font editor (many credz to the author) and edited "default8x16" (default font usually used). The result I renamed to "def8x16BXse" this font when loaded (setfont def8x16BXse) shows swedish chars okey and most other used chars to with TWO EXCEPTIONS! the char used to make singlelined borders (upper and lower) is replaced by a swedish char (A with two dots) wich means BAD LOOKS IN "mc" etc. The other char is a border char to, the one with two side borders connecting to one right border, and it is replaced by O with two dots. This means you have to replace theese chars in your scripts and bitchx.sav with other chars ( I used - and + ). A good tool for this is the command "tr", read the man page for it! I'm satisfied with this, and if you have a better solution TELL ME!
I pretty mush lived in #BitchX on EFnet and IRCnet and Undernet, read dox. and asked people lots of stupid questions! I found out that in an Xterm window that already worked with swedish chars u didn't have to do anything except undefining that emacs stuff mentioned above.
Version 71, got the translation variable back into it wich should mean that you don't have to do all stuff above, just /set TRANSLATION latin1, unfortunately there is a bug in the translation stuff and panasync told me to wait for a patch.
I have tried atleast 15 times to compile with tcl.o, but when gcc are about to link *.o's together into BitchX executable I get lots of unreferenced call to *.tcl*. Asked 5 times in #BitchX after a while panasync told me to do a make distclean and re-edit the Makefile, so I did.... and it didn't work!