you only scratched the surface of the problem because you eventually want your strings to have variable parts. And in different languages theses parts will be assembled in different orders so printf is of no help here. The library gettext helps you to handle that (as you mentionned) and the good news is: it seems to be supported by a Perl wrapper:

check http://cpan.org/authors/id/P/PV/PVANDRY/gettext-1.01.tar.gz

-- stefp