Quoting MJ Ray (mjr@phonecoop.coop):
Question raised on -l10n-esperanto recently: can gettext be used for
localising a program with a utf-8 non-English source language? That is,
the thing in the _("...") has accents and isn't English.
I hope I expressed the question adequately. The gettext manual seems to
stress using English everywhere, so the answer isn't clear to me. I
hope some people with relevant experience are reading -i18n.
This is maybe not the case you describe: another case would be
translating an application orginally written in a non English language
an,d just use gettxtfor its strings......Here, I'm not completely sure
that there would be perfect solution.