Comment 11 for bug 1580678

Sadly, no change in behavior with any of these:
 - applying patch 323950
 - changing gettext_ to just return whatever it was passed in
 - setting system locale to en_US.UTF-8
 - explicitly setting LANG/LC_ALL/LANGUAGE/etc to en_US.UTF-8 (verified via /proc/${pid}/environ that it picked it up)

After digging deeper, the exception I get isn't occurring because the translation string templates have unicode in them (the ones I'm using don't) -- it's occurring because the str it is trying to expand into the already-translated template is just that -- a str instead of a unicode type. This explains why 323950 doesn't apply to my issue.

Since my exception occurs at a different point I've opened bug #1597210 for it.