When emerging 1.42, econf failed as configure was unable to find intltool. This most likely also applies to 1.22, although I wasn't able to reproduce it for that version as configure somehow found intltool even though I had unmerged it.
intltool dep. is there, but under conditional if you are building the gui.. "emerge -pv transmission" output please
Sorry, must have overlooked the conditional dep. Anyway, I was building with -gtk and configure still wanted intltool. [...] [ebuild N ] net-p2p/transmission-1.42 USE="-gtk -libnotify -nls" [...] checking for intltool >= 0.23... ./configure: line 24242: intltool-update: command not found configure: error: Your intltool is too old. You need intltool 0.23 or later. [...]
Upstream configure.ac doesn't seem to be behaving as it should, anyway.. it's 'fixed' now by forcing both gettext and intltool without of chance of disabling them.