I have no experience with Locale::Maketext, but have had good luck using the following:

use encoding 'utf8';
use POSIX qw/locale_h/;
use Locale::gettext;

textdomain('program-name');
setlocale( LC_MESSAGES, '' );
bind_textdomain_codeset( 'program-name', 'UTF-8' );
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Hope this helps.