More info is needed. What do you mean with "missing gettext".

There are several parts needed to successfully build with i18n/l10n support:
- autopoint is needed by autogen.sh (and autogen should complain if autopoint is
missing) 
- some C functions, found in the GNU libc. If not, configure will install the
source files needed to compile a static libintl with the gettext C functions.
- some tools (msgfmt, msgmerge, xgettext - known as GNU gettext-tools), to
create the .po and the .gmo files

Only the presence of those tools is not (automatically) checked.

So, what exactly is missing on your system ? The gettext-tools ?