Every translator knows, or learns soon, that consistency is of paramount importance. And not just in translation, but in any kind of technical document. I remember reading a revealing comment on this regard by Don Bush in his well-regarded column “The Friendly Editor” on Intercom, the magazine of the Society of Technical Communication. (Unfortunately the column has ended, after several years. It had always good insights into technical communication writing.) At a conference, Bush recounted, a technical writer had stated that it was preferably to have a consistent error in a document rather that having an inconsistency only half of the time for the same error. And we can guess the reasoning behind such preference.
