It has already been pointed out that providing localized messages
requires the ability to re-order the localization arguments.

There is more too it though. Different locales have different
conventions for displaying numbers, monetary values, dates and handling
singular/plural.

Java's message formatting class
   http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/api/java/text/MessageFormat.html
and the classes related to that, provide pretty comprehensive
functionality for doing localization, including:
* arg re-positioning
* number, monetary value and date formatting
* handling of plurals

Notably all these features can be combined into a single format string
and hence the API could be easily mapped to the API proposed in srfi-28,
i.e.
  (format pattern obj ...) => string

Matthias.