It would seem that the is a problem in the autoconf magic of gawk that does not set some DEFINEs properly causing the resulting binary to not work in a way that the lang-gawk check in gettext expects. The pertinent upstream discussion is at http://199.232.76.165/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2005-08/msg00061.html
3.1.5-r2 should have this fixed
Verified with gettext-0.14.6 and gawk-3.1.5-r2.
*** Bug 141412 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 162332 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 172385 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***