> GNOME uses some soft hyphens in their msgids to workaround some
> line-breaking issues.

1) What is the purpose of having soft hyphens in a POT file?
In my opinion, these soft hyphens cannot help the translator,
therefore they should best be filtered out when generating the
POT file.

2) Why would the translator want to see them?
In my opinion, these soft hyphens cannot help the translator,
therefore even if present in the POT file, they should remain
invisible.

If some message should be conveyed to the translator (such as:
"Please insert soft-hyphens, because the available horizontal
space is at most 7 characters"), this should be done by
translator comments. It cannot be done through soft hyphens in
the msgid, because some English words consist of 1 syllable and
therefore don't have a place where to put a soft-hyphen.