While working on making builds reproducible for openSUSE,
I found multiple packages randomly missing translations in .desktop files.

Affected packages are at least
exo
gedit
gedit-plugins
gnome-menus
gnome-video-effects
lxmenu-data

for an example diff see
https://www.zq1.de/~bernhard/linux/reproducibleopensuse/compare.factory/exo-compare.out

when looking at the build.log it had sequences like
[   49s] Generating and caching the translation database
[   49s] Merging translations into debian-sensible-browser.desktop.
[   49s] LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/intltool-merge  -d -u -c
../../po/.intltool-merge-cache ../../po epiphany.desktop.in epiphany.desktop
[   49s] Found cached translation database
[   49s] Merging translations into epiphany.desktop.
[   49s] LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/intltool-merge  -d -u -c
../../po/.intltool-merge-cache ../../po eterm.desktop.in eterm.desktop
[   49s] Generating and caching the translation database
[   49s] Merging translations into encompass.desktop.
[   49s] LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/intltool-merge  -d -u -c
../../po/.intltool-merge-cache ../../po evolution.desktop.in evolution.desktop
[   49s] Generating and caching the translation database
[   49s] Merging translations into debian-x-terminal-emulator.desktop.
[   49s] LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/intltool-merge  -d -u -c
../../po/.intltool-merge-cache ../../po firefox.desktop.in firefox.desktop
[   49s] Found cached translation database

so my guess is that this is running in parallel with make -j8
and thus there might be races with processes using the cache file
before it is fully generated.

Assiging to GNOME team as maintainers of intltool-merge tool