With translation file do you refer to a new translation under "zp-core/locale"? There I haven't touched anything.
Maybe it's not completely clear what I've done:
[list=1]
[]Copy zenphoto to the server.
[]Run initial setup.
[]Install new language (ru_RU) on server (on my Debian box with dpkg-reconfigure locales).
[]New language cannot be selected under Options -> General -> Language.
[]Run setup again from Overview -> Utility functions.
[]Now the new language can be selected under Options -> General -> Language.
[/list]
In Zenphoto terms translation means a folder with .mo/.po translation files within /zp-core/locale/. You were referring to the server locale which is not a translation. It just provides some capabilities for automatically generated output like month/day names etc.
If you instal a new locale on a server it would not be surprising if you would need to restart the server itself. But Zenphoto's setup should not be related, unless I missed something. But I never isntalled locales on a server as I am not server admin.
Sorry for the confusion ...
I just checked again by installing French locale: the setup step is necessary; plus restarting the server.
To complete my list from above:
[list=1]
[]Copy zenphoto to the server.
[]Run initial setup.
[]Install new locale on server (on my Debian box with dpkg-reconfigure locales).
[]New language cannot be selected under Options -> General -> Language.
[]Restart server (service apache2 restart for me)
[]Run setup again from Overview -> Utility functions.
[*]Now the new language can be selected under Options -> General -> Language.
[/list]
Restarting only the server doesn't do the trick.
Sure. that no browser or any server cache played tricks on your here? I did test a lot of translation files and I never had to re-run setup for them. But again I never installed any locales on the server myself. Possibly servers are different here as in many other things . But in the end it now works for your and that's what counts, right? :-)
We could add a section to the article that this might be a reason. but this is not really zenphoto specific I think. gettext and locales are used by a lot of other systems as well.