Hello,
As a language with poor morphology, English sometimes does not distinguish verbs from nouns. Filter, Upload, Archive, Link, Update, Post... and many other words that are used in Drupal. Other languages are a more morphology-heavy and when we translate Drupal to other languages this ambiguity may be a problem. Take Upload, for instance. There is a button "Upload", but there is also a module "Upload". There's the need to use different words.
It's not an exclusivity for noun/verbs, though. "Order" is one thing in Views, and another thing in Ubercart. The shorter the string, the easier it is to exist this kind of ambiguity.
There is already the use in Drupal core of string context. The blank variable in "!long-month-name May" is used distinguish "May" in the series "January, February.." to "May" in the series "Jan, Feb...". This very pattern could be used elsewhere: "!noun Filter" would be different from "!verb Filter", so that we could translate "Filtro" and "Filtrar", respectively, or "Filter" and "filtern".
What do you think? Is this a good approach or something more radical should be done to support contexts? Perhaps a fourth symbol - #context, instead of "!, @, %" , to make it mor organized? There is still time to fix Drupal 7.
See you,
José San Martin Brazilian translator