Really high memory usage with almost no plugins — could Arabic / Hebrew text be a factor?

MO files (the translations) are memory expensive, especially for languages whose characters need multiple bytes for each – like Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese and so on.

So an increased memory usage is normal when you are using translated text. But 33 MB is really not that much. I wouldn’t worry about that. More important are sudden spikes in usage, monitor the values over a longer time. These are usually not a result of translations.