sigh, nevermind, it's already there.  Just read srfi-29.

				Bear

On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, bear wrote:

>
>When modifying code to work for users who use another language,
>it is frequently necessary to reorder the "data" parts of the
>output to match the syntax of the language of output.
>
>For example, if I am talking about some chunk of data as a
>thing being acted upon (linguistically, a direct object) by
>a procedure (linguistically, a verb) in my debugger error
>messages, then the verb should come before the direct object
>in English, but the verb should come after the direct object
>in German.  Since both of these (data and function name) are
>likely to be parameters of the format statement, being unable
>to reorder them by just changing the format string causes a
>problem.
>
>When finished, I'd like to be able to write something like:
>
>(let ((language 'en ))
>  (display
>     (format (strings "sorry, can't ~1a the object ~2a" language)
>	errproc
>	errdata)))
>
>Because this would allow all the localization can be done
>by providing additional format strings for different languages,
>without the need to rearrange code.  Specifically, this would
>allow the same code to operate in multiple languages as long
>as a binding for the variable 'language' were in scope and
>the strings function had lookup tables for format strings in
>the specified language.  (I'm assuming use of the same language
>specifiers as used in the HTTP protocol).
>
>			Bear
>
>(considering writing that SRFI for the (strings) function...)
>