Poedit fatal error, can't generate the .mo file?!

or maybe other software? anyone?

This is an issue between PoEdit and WordPress. PoEdit seems incapable of dealing with the _x plurals. I’ve not tried any of the tools listed below but perhaps one of these will help:
https://gorm.po.dk/
https://betterpoeditor.sourceforge.net/
https://www.opentag.com/okapi/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

In the meantime, I’ll try and find out what .po editor is being used in the plugins SVN repository. That copes with all of the localization strings without any problem.

thanks for that!
I managed to make it work with this fix:

enter this in the Plural forms field in Catalog>Settings
nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);

I’m told that this fix either doesn’t work or isn’t reliable enough to be used by plugin developers (more’s the pity). But if it works for translators, great! ??