makemessages failing with non ascii characters in templates

Hi, I am trying to create a .po file to start a translation. I use the command './manage.py makemessages -l ru' to try to create the Russian locale. The script seems to be working for a while and then crashes with:

processing language ru  Traceback (most recent call last):    File "./manage.py", line 15, in <module>      execute_manager(settings)    File "/home/env/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 438, in execute_manager      utility.execute()    File "/home/env/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 379, in execute      self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)    File "/home/env/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 191, in run_from_argv      self.execute(*args, **options.__dict__)    File "/home/env/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 220, in execute      output = self.handle(*args, **options)    File "/home/env/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 351, in handle      return self.handle_noargs(**options)    File "/home/env/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/commands/makemessages.py", line 365, in handle_noargs      make_messages(locale, domain, verbosity, process_all, extensions, symlinks, ignore_patterns, no_wrap, no_obsolete)    File "/home/env/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/commands/makemessages.py", line 233, in make_messages      f.write(templatize(src, orig_file[2:]))    File "/home/env/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/utils/translation/__init__.py", line 127, in templatize      return _trans.templatize(src, origin)    File "/home/env/project/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/utils/translation/trans_real.py", line 450, in templatize      content = u''.join(comment)  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 7: ordinal not in range(128)

From what I understand makemessages will crash in such a way when encountering a non ascii character in a template, whether marked for translation or not.
So I have been looking for non ascii characters in the templates of this project and indeed there are quite a lot of them.
Now my question is, if it really is a problem with non ascii characters in template files, then what can I do about those characters? Is there a way
to mark a template file as utf8 as in a .py script? Or what am I missing?

thanks!

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