[Aptitude-devel] Doc translations: Untranslatable strings?

[Mario Blättermann]

Hello,

currently I'm working on the German translation of the Aptitude docs. Hopefully
I will finish it before Jessie gets frozen. Some of the strings look as follows:

# type: Content of: <refentry><refsect1><variablelist><varlistentry><term>
#. type: Content of the Snot entity
#: en/aptitude.xml:83
msgid "<literal><link linkend='searchNot'>?not</link></literal>"
msgstr "<literal><link linkend='searchNot'>?not</link></literal>"

As far as I can see, other translators have copied the strings literally, but I
was wondering how those are processed? Does it make sense to translate the
content, "?not" in this case? Or is this just a constraint of po4a, which can't
handle XML strings yet which doesn't need to be translated? Thanks for explanations.

Best Regards,
Mario