@Wyck, there are several translation files in order to minimize the amount of memory consumed by the translation on the front end. This can be very high number for languages that use many characters in every word like german ;) but not only it.
so yes, in theory there might be a situation in which you have the same word used in the front-end and admin and have different translation, but that is the job of the per language translation "manager" to make sure this doesn't happen.
haven't seen your original question, but if you don't get a translation at all and you can see in the relevant .po file that the string has a translation, then for some reason you don't load the right translation file for the user profile
@Rarst no, yours + Fractal are enough :) If I have to criticize something it will be too much things in Application constructor and too much new inside classes methods :P
well I think the $this->get() may go somewhere else than constructor. And yes, as discussed yesterday, I think that constructor issues is the only archicture weakness. But I think that thing will evolve, if you will support it.
@MarkKaplun ah makes sense, the docs are confusing. I sorted it out except for some reason the password strength indicator text would not translate, no time to check why so I just use the best translate function ever... jQuery's .text