The final status update:  PyPy with utf-8 unicodes translates and, with the exception of one last test that is still failing, works correctly (or at least appears to.)  Fixing translation issues was easier than I thought it would be, so I most spent the last two weeks fixing bugs that resulted from differences between the behavior of the translated and untranslated code.  For example, although RPython supports using __len__ with the built-in len() function, it doesn't use __len__ when evaluating a object as a boolean.  As a result, there were a number of locations where the compiled interpreter would seg-fault or hang even though the untranslated code worked correctly.

There's still a few of things left to do in the last week; the aforementioned test being one of them.  Unfortunately, I doubt that there will time for my branch to be reviewed and merged before the summer is over, but I think I'll definitely finish the work I have left to do.