>I would avoid calling gettext() with anything not intended to to translated.

Yes, well, this is a bit difficult when the text is coming from a static
table that can contain some elements that need translation, and others that
don't. Passing a NULL pointer for the text is unfortunately already used as
a signal to omit the widget completely (this was needed for the tags popup
in case of cmail, I think: that had an optional extra message field). I
could of course test explicitly for an empty string, and suppress
translation if it occurs. Or, more generally, introduce a NO_GETTEXT flag
with Label Options as well. (Btw, I guess that for ComboBox options that
flag is nowhere used anymore, now the engine-select has been changed to
ListBoxes, the content of which is never translated.) But all those
solutions seemed a lot longer than adding the 4 bytes needed to turn empty
strings into spaces, just adding unnecessary complexity for no clear
benifit. Surely gettext must always be resistent to a missing translation.