One approach to excluding content within tags from being translated is to add a translate="no" attribute. For example, <pre translate="no">This would NOT be translated</pre>.
Yep, that was the case. Although, I checked the version at the command line prior to posting, we happened to have an .htaccess override that was causing an older version of PHP to run.
Now that we are running PHP 5.4.x (5.4.45) all is well! Thanks.