one of the translation aims is to provide consistency of terminology. some translation teams have glossaries to achieve this (german, french, for examples). however, reality bites.
i’ve started to use the wonderful Open-Tran.eu project to search for inconsistencies – enter an english term and see the results from the po files of the different GNOME modules. the german po files have at least five different translations of “website”, and also inconsistent translations of strings like “page setup”, “scrollbar”, “mount”, “eject” or “select”, to mention a few i’ve searched for. perhaps other languages have a smaller variety of expressions that one can translate a string to, but i thought this information could be useful to share.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
work.
As you know I reported a bug or two today against packages that could use the gtk+ stock texts but don’t. This might already provide some improvement (by making it impossible to have it inconsistent). We have written poconflicts in the translate toolkit for this purpose of checking for certain types of inconsistencies. I thought you might be interested: http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/poconflict
[shameless plug]
A while back I wrote this post:
http://djihed.com/arabisation/statistical-analysis-of-strings-in-popular-open-source-projects
I used a script to cook up the most popular strings to try and consistently translate them. This is a big issue for Arabic because nearly none of the computing related terms are settled yet.
It helped us immensely in prioritising and identifying strings where conflicts are even less tolerated.