economy in translations

[Nils-Christoph Fiedler <fiedler medienkompanie de>]

hej folks,

i have a little question about economy in translating software.
busy as a bee, we're translating every single line / string of software.
but isn't there a possibility, technically, to just write a big library
or a "super-giga-master.po"-file, which includes all of the strings,
instead of translating equal strings in different software again and
again? i mean even in one file some terms appear more than one time and
e.g. the strings "File", "Edit" or "View" also occur in nearly every
lib. i guess we could save a hundreds of hours of translating. 
so this might be a stupid question from a translator to a developer, but
isn't it possible, that strings in software referr to one big catalog,
instead of one .po for every single application?

kind regards,
nils