Bidi and format strings

Hi,

I am part of a project where we use fribidi for RTL support. We make use 
of format strings like

"Player %s has won the game!"

When an Hebrew version of this has gone into fribidi, however, the 
output contains "s%" and not "%s".

So my question(s) are/is:
1) is this normal behavior, or a result of incorrect configuration or 
similar issue?
2) if normal, what is the usual way people use to work around this 
issue? Note that simply writing
s% in the Hebrew translation is not possible because GNU gettext will 
refuse to compile the catalog
in this case, saying the format strings don't match between original and 
translation.

Thanks

-- Auria