It would be better someone else than me who actually has some knowledge about python would try to help.
The problem seems to be that penelope expects that the input file is utf-8 encoded and your input dictionary has some other encoding.
On GitHub page of penelope, I see that there is an optional argument to set the encoding of the input file:
Code:
--input-file-encoding INPUT_FILE_ENCODING
use the specified encoding for reading the raw
contents of input file(s) (default: 'utf-8')
Maybe you can figure out which encoding your input dictionary has. Maybe it is latin-1.