My system is a Redhat with the UTF-makefile bug, thus I had to use LANG=C perl Makefile.PL to build the makefile.
Self-answer.. Yes, this is directly related to the UTF bug in redhat.
Apparently in SA 3.0 the effects of the bug spread further than just the "perl Makefile.PL" step. I'm going to fix the i18n file as per the alternative solution in the wiki
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/Pod2ManRedHat
