Errors in PO files

[Martin Eberhard Schauer <Martin.E.Schauer@gmx.de>]

          Hi,

since i translated some PO files recently, i had a look at
http://i18n.debian.net/compendia/po/xx.

I found pretty "fat" PO-Files accompanied by .log files. Having a
glance at the (German) logfile i found
- about fifteen files without or with a wrong charset specified
  (with the consequence of removing them from the compilation),
- more than 400 files with a charset different from UTF-8,
- more than 1000 remarks about escape sequences that should
  not appear in i18n messages.

How serious are these errors and warnings?
Of course, fixing the po-files would have advantages from the technicians'
point of view:
* the daily build would be faster because of less error processing,
* smaller logfile because of less error messages,
* less need to convert files on the fly,
* less power consumption ...

I know that i should »RTFM«. What do you think about the measures against
the gettext complaints and their degree of efficiency?

- fixing header and encoding (plus review and finishing partial 
translations)
- filing bug reports related to the escape sequences

Should they be postponed because there are i18n/l10n issues with higher
priority?

Kind regards
  Martin