See also bug 28617

The fix for this bug seems rather simple, but sadly it isn't so. In my testing, I moved the bolding and link rendering from $1 to the useractivity-award message and changed wfMsg to wfMsgExt with the parse option and passed $row->sg_user_name as $1 to the message.
It introduced not one but two new bugs: annoying <p> tags that messed with the display in a place where they weren't supposed to be and the Parser's strip marked (UNIQ string) was exposed when using the siteactivity parser hook.

Can you test wfMessage( )->...->parse()?

I can try that later on whenever I have time for minor bugs, such as this one. Do note that I don't plan to break backwards compatibility before November 2011 (as per [[mw:Version lifecycle]]); supporting 1.17 would probably be rather silly/awkward, as it has never been 'officially' supported.
Once I've dropped support for pre-1.18 MWs, I can apply the patch to fix bug #30953 and try fixing this one, too. This isn't a high-priority bug because it isn't actively breaking anything (as opposed to #30953, for example), it's just a minor inconvenience for translators in certain languages.

Change 82352 had a related patch set uploaded by Jack Phoenix:
SocialProfile: bug #25337 - GENDER support for [[MediaWiki:Useractivity-award]].

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/82352

Change 82352 merged by Jack Phoenix:
SocialProfile: bug #25337 - GENDER support for [[MediaWiki:Useractivity-award]].

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/82352

Thanks for fixing, Jack!