Do you really want to keep the same format strings when localizing an application? Isn't it much cleaner to just define multiple format strings? Translations in general don't work that way, you can't just move around words and translate them individually, usually the whole expression changes.
That's the point. You can't change the format strings to a different word order if the selection of values used to fill the fields is entirely dependent on word order (i.e., how the basic printf syntax works), unless you have a separate line/block of code that executes when the word order of the current locale differs.
I see your point now. Yes, I can see Python 3's syntax facilitate some of that work. I still think you will need branches and/or polymorphisms to do more complex localizations, especially when you need to support east asian languages.
We just have a database of sentences and a translation is a lookup in the DB by some unique identifier. Trying to semi-translate a string just doesn't work very well in the long run (for us).
