Ok, I couldn't resist getting the Arabic support (mostly) right. Malek helped me and by what he tells me, we've succeeded mostly. There are a few things left to do around wildly wrapping symbol characters, but that'll be worked out eventually.
So, this little patch updates dasBlog with French, Russian and Arabic, including full right-to-left reading support, which the engine injects appropriately into the <body> tag (dir="RTL") based on a hint in the Arabic resource table.