libintl: stubs or working functions?

[Рысь <lynx@sibserver.ru>]

I noticed that musl had got some gettext functions as a lightweight and
more saner interface. However, I now have a couple questions about them
as ordinary user.

A bit of history.
I had successfully built and used custom x86 musl based X11 root which
uses both Xfbdev and Xorg servers on different machines. It is based on
my previous musl on servers experience, just added X11 and major gui
libraries on top of it.

My root attracted a user because of it's small size to fit into budget
netbook with very small disk size (about 4GB I think). The problem is
that user does not speak (and understand) English at all, but he accepts
my preferred program set which I preinstalled into root.

So I faced a problem: I had built this root for myself and everywhere I
did seen "--disable-nls" in configure scripts I used it. Now, I tried
to rebuild untranslated programs, noticed that translation files (.po
-> *.gmo) were created and installed in /local/share/locale/.

However, trying to define LC_ALL and LANG environment variables as in
most of glibc systems does not change anything. The programs still
English translated.

And a couple questions here:

* Did I understand that right that I do not need GNU gettext anymore and
  I can use musl's interface for that?
* Do I still need original GNU gettext to translate *.po's to *.gmo's?
  (I used gettext-tiny)
* If musl can handle that, how I should configure it? Are environment
  variables work?

Whole story and questions may be stupid if I misunderstand the purpose
of those functions, so sorry.