Emacs's po-mode mishandles .po files that specify charset=us-ascii. To reproduce the problem on Fedora, run 'LC_ALL=cs_CZ.iso88592 emacs -Q fr.po' with fr.po being the attached file (taken from Texinfo 6.0), and type '# C-x 8 RET 161 RET RET C-x C-s'. The file will be saved with the line '#š' prepended, in Latin-2 encoding, even though the file declares its encoding to be charset=us-ascii. If I visit the modified file again with 'LC_ALL=fr_FR.iso88591 emacs -Q fr.po' I will see a first line of '#¹'. This example is merely of a bad comment, but I suppose this could lead to a bad translation. It's only a minor problem, as .po files should be using UTF-8 nowadays instead of US-ASCII. I'm reporting it only because I suppose the bug could be more general than just po-mode.