[Mailman-i18n] msgfmt: errors with files under mailman/messages

[Pedro Bezunartea López]

I'm currently using mailman 2.1.9 on FC5. A couple of weeks ago I decided
it was time to go UTF-8 all the way. Apache is doing it, the filesystem is
doing it, so why shouldn't mailman do it?

After translating all the messages in the archives and a the templates, it
was the files in /usr/lib/mailman/messages/. I have the following
directories there:
ar  ca  cs  da  de  es  et  eu  fi  fr  hr  hu  ia  it  ja  ko  lt  nl  no
  pl  pt  pt_BR  ro  ru  sl  sr  sv  tr  uk  vi  zh_CN  zh_TW

And I was specially interested in the spanish translation, so after
converting the file es/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.po to UTF-8, I tried:
# msgfmt -o mailman.mo mailman.po
mailman.po:11063: `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both begin with '\n'
mailman.po:11228: `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both end with '\n'
mailman.po:11355: `msgid' and `msgstr' entries do not both end with '\n'
msgfmt: found 3 fatal errors

I've tried with other languages and some of them have the same problem:
cs, fr, hr, ia, etc... The only way to fix it was to comment (delete)
quite a few `msgid' and `msgstr' lines.

What is the proper way to handle this? How can mailman be distributed with
pairs of mailman.mo and mailman.po files that don't work through msgfmt?
Is it my msgfmt version?

Any ideas? TIA,

Pedro Bezunartea López.