Hi, a serious bug was reported in debian, as inkscape is almost unusable in chinese environments (http://bugs.debian.org/487623). Forwarded to our bugtracker, the crash seems to be triggered by a particular translation in the open file dialog, see https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/261475 but happens in other situations too and is related to font handling.
I've made a patch to prevent the crash, but I wasn't able to find what's the real issue between pango and inkscape with LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.UTF-8. Some more details and the actual patch are available in the bug report.
I'll commit the patch in a few days, just because I'd like someone else more familiar with libnrtype/Font* code to inspect what's really going wrong there instead of just fixing symptoms... So please have a look at it ;)
Cheers, Luca