Working with a translation team in DRC in both Luke and Genesis, I suggested we consider making the proper names consistent, even though French versions are split between rendering them the same or different in the two testaments. Nicholas Bailey recently posted an article on academia.edu that provides a framework for making such decisions, arguing for rendering them consistently.
Bailey's abstract for "Proper Names in the Bible: translation and transliteration issues Proper Names in the Bible: translation and transliteration issues":
According to one method of counting, there are about 2670 Old Testament Hebrew proper names and 580 New Testament Greek proper names, and out of these names, about 165 are common to both Testaments. Although a translation team may not be thrilled about working through all these names in their translation, there are, to be sure, unmistakable rewards if they handle them in a systematic and appropriate way. Handling them in a systematic way saves time and leads to a more consistent product. And, more importantly, doing the needed research and testing to find out what forms of names are most appropriate for their receptor language can improve the reception of their translation and the joy their readers will have from all those names.
This paper summarizes three topics that can help a team handle names systematically and appropriately: • general issues revolving around proper names, including (a) linguistic and (b) translation issues; • issues pertaining to transliterating Biblical proper names from Hebrew and Greek; • how a translation team can use the computer program NameTrans to automatically transliterate all of the names of the Bible, thereby creating a database that can be used for spellchecking and other functions.
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