Well, as Gambas becomes more and more important to VL I figured it's in my best interest to take out the time to learn it. I have to say I like the facilities a lot, even though the object model is kind of iffy compared to Python and BASIC is an unpleasant reminder of my early youth.
Anyway, I wrote a sample application with a translated label. I was impressed to see that issuing an executable packaged the translation into the binary! But something seemed amiss. Because the widgets in my form are manually arranged (the automatic formatters seemed not to do what I needed), they wouldn't resize at run time.
That's a problem because the way some languages explain things varies in length from English, especially wrt technical topics. Look at some of the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications to see what I mean. To experiment, I typed 'Här är Gambasmaskoten osv. osv. osv. osv. osv. osv.' to make a translated string arbitrarily long and ran it with LANG=sv_SE. To my dismay, the string filled up the label and then some, clipping most of the text.
And that's a disaster in case I ever learn Finnish.

For those more experienced with Basic and Gambas, what should I do? (*cough*, Joe1962)