printk() indexing

Yeah sure, but good knowledge about the pitfalls of translation (or in general: localization) is always required for good translations. The question I answered was "how does gettext deal with terms that have different meanings in different contexts", and in order to solve this in any way, shape or form, requires awareness of the possibility of different meanings. No matter the translation system in use.

Systems that use symbols instead of real text in the source files also require the author to have that awareness so that the author can use two different symbols in different places, even if both symbols' corresponding text in the original language is the same.

Localization is a complex topic. You cannot magic complexity away. All systems add to that complexity in certain ways, some more than others. Some systems only seem to do away with part of the complexity, but at the cost of flexibility and expressiveness, leading to awkward or wrong translations.