That would depend on the language you use as your base, I guess. I think that the approach would only work if the language you want to use for your strings doesn't have or need too many non-ascii characters to produce something readable. I know for instance German has rules about replacing "Güt" with "Guet" and the Ringel-S (sorry, no idea how to type that one on my keyboard here) with a double-s. How that would work on "Saint Honoré", I don't know, I don't often run into strings like that in my applications. I guess I would just leave off the accent from the é. I know I (have to) do that for my name all the time anyway...
What I do, is that I keep all strings in my sources in English. English doesn't have non-ascii characters, so normally you would not run into these. Then, I make translation files
to English (yes, translate English to English to get plurals working)
other required language(s) if needed.
When I need non-ascii characters in my source, for instance when I want to use symbols from the unicode table, I usually use the unicode code directly. That is, instead of writing QChar('∞'), I would use QChar(0x221E); //infinity symbol. That happens only sporadically though, little enough to make that workable.
