When Thunar side pane holds multibyte text items it's minimal width is set to the twice the width of the text. The issue reproduces in openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3 with ru_RU.KOI8-R locale and Mandriva 2008.0 with ru_RU.UTF-8 locale. All systems run Thunar 0.9.0.
I'm seeing the same when running Thunar with LANG=ja_JP.utf8, it's pretty annoying.
Take a look at the thunar-shortcuts-view.c file on line 307. Here's the code: "width-chars", strlen (_("File System")), It is not a good idea to use strlen() for checking string length encoded with multibyte encoding. The solution is (probably) to use wcswidth() to calculate the length of a string or remove this line at all and it will remove links panel width limitation.
*** Bug 5390 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This should be fixed in git. Please re-open if it's still not working for you. commit 10dbf54f58c1b78e2f65863212e1e2179f24e318 Author: Jannis Pohlmann <jannis@xfce.org> Date: Fri Sep 18 23:41:06 2009 +0200 Use g_utf8_strlen to calculate the sidepane width. Bugs #5390 and #3965. Using strlen() for the number of characters is unrealistic when dealing with multibyte strings.
*** Bug 5358 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***