Oh, I've really borked something and I can't find out yet what it is.

Basically, most program-installs are very likely to throw up with invalid multibyte sequence. Even the make check of gettext itself will do it.

What in the heck did I do wrong?

Oh, don't ask me what "distro" I'm running or what "packages" I've installed ... this is my "Red Hat Nine-and-Three-Quarters" and I've had all kinds of friendly adventures with it lately. But this particular situation is unexpectedly pervasive, in that gettext (0.14.4 or 0.14.5), which is responsible for translation (afaik...) is failing its own checks. So my question is not so much "how do I get myself out of this," since I rather got myself into this in order to figure my way out, but I'm becoming stumped. "What's the root cause of this now-highly-pervasive problem?" What would cause all kinds of .po files to start throwing this particular error?