I've now pushed another commit b5178b325409b1eaf953f8f3007a180cbd27b167 to master, which changes the replacement perl to think it is version 5.26.1, although it's actually version 5.26.2. With this fix, I'm now able to build guix without 'po4a' reporting errors.
Please try it out and let me know if there are still problems. Mark