Unicode is an encoding system that is intended to include the building blocks of all known human languages save Old Chinese. Rather than having a different encoding for every language, the Unicode Consortium created a super-encoding that includes subsets for all of the included languages.
The most common Unicode encoding is "UTF-8". This means that the Unicode character is encoded in an 8-bit format. There is a 16-bit format that is analagously called "UTF-16". I have dealt with the core technicalities behind Unicode in my general tutorial on encodings in Python.
For the German and French feeds of the present tutorial, the program receives and must be able to export the feed in 8-bit Unicode format. That is the encoding of the feeds and should be the encoding of the output (unless you want to do a character-for-character conversion). If one of the feeds that you read is in a different encoding, you will need to include handling for that format in your program. For example, the RSS feed for China's main news site, Xinhua.cn, comes with an encoding of "GB2312", Chinese Simplified. The Python part of the application must present the data in this encoding if the feed is to appear correctly.
Now, knowing a bit about Unicode, we can use Python's encode method to tell Python to speak French and German (and a host of other languages).