This is not a "symbol" (in the sense you mean, @ or $ in Perl and Ruby), it is a function called (or aliased) "_". The GNU gettext tools, on which Python gettext and TG i18n tools are based, look for this function call to extract text strings for translation. It is not "magic mapping", it is aliasing a function and adding that alias to the __builtins__ dictionary for convenience.If that is bad then one should also remove other "magic" functions like divmod and list and dict. We should then go back to coding C and having #include <stdio.h> before we can do basic input and output.
PS. In fact the default Python gettext functionality does this with the install function: http://docs.python.org/lib/node328.html so if you have an issue with this you should take it up in comp.lang.python as well.
