aterm in base is not UTF-8 compatible and will cause many headaches in a localised environment. Please consider to replace with urxvt which is nearly as small as aterm, provides the same featuers and works fine with UTF-8.
"Rxvt-unicode, commonly known as urxvt, is a color VT102 terminal emulator for the X Window System. It was written by Marc Lehmann, who forked it from rxvt in November 2003. Stability, internationalization and support for Unicode is its primary focus, as well as the capability to display different fonts and locales simultaneously.
Another goal of the project is to be resource-friendly like rxvt. Even though it has features such as transparency, Perl extensions, and support for Xft fonts, it can still be configured to be lean and efficient, according to the author. Furthermore, it has a daemon mode that reduces memory usage and startup time when using multiple terminals."
Seems to be an ideal match. It is already in the repo, so easy to test.