2.7 does Unicode quite well. Not as well as it should, certainly, but arguably better than 3.3 did. I haven't played with anything since, and given the long history of this project going off the rails, I will require some serious convincing before I waste more time in it.

Yes I do multilingual string processing a LOT. I worked in SMT for about 3 years. Python 2.7 was the only practical option.

Python 3 does not fix the GIL. That would be enough to get me interested again.