http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437371#c4 The condition to trigger the bug is that opening tag or the content of the tag contains non-ascii chars. e.g: <title>Quotes are for weak people, strong people have their own opinions - Dawid Węgliński (cla)</title> <body> <figure link="/images/gwn/20070917_cla.jpg" short="cla" caption="Dawid Węgliński, aka cla"/> The symptom is: Stack trace: Traceback (most recent call last): File "xml2po.py", line 856, in ? doSerialize(doc) File "xml2po.py", line 589, in doSerialize outtxt += doSerialize(child) File "xml2po.py", line 583, in doSerialize (starttag, content, endtag, translation) = processElementTag(node, repl, 1) File "xml2po.py", line 525, in processElementTag translation = translation.replace(' ' % (i), replacement) UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 635: ordinal not in ...