The French language file in 1.2.1 contains encoded entities:
d&<a href='/039'>#039</a>;entrer ```
It might be because on my windows box (which I use to grab the cleaned translation files after the unit test languagesManager.test.php has ran) the addcslashes or something else encodes these entities.
The other problem is the failing test, which doesn't fail on my box
http://qa.piwik.org:8080/webtest/003_UnitTests/001_response_invoke.html
Proposed solution: the languages manager test should remove entities from the language files when cleaning them up before the release.
The first problem: a change in TranslationsAdmin or how you get the original translation files from Noah?
The second problem: I didn't figure out the cause but I'll merge my "tidy" code into the LanguagesManager and TranslationsAdmin.
(In [4149]) Fixes #2202 Now converting all entities to their characters when cleaning up translation files before release
One side effect is that & is now & only (which I rememberr fails W3C recommendations... but hey at least it's working!
(In [4154]) refs #2202 - debug failing unit test
(In [4155]) refs #2202 - more debug