Well, i have N900 and living in China. If you don't want to try anything from the commandline then really you shouldn't be installing stuff from the devel and testing repo now should you?

for the translation stuff, you can try the gui to google translation which you can find in the devel/testing repo, i forget the name but you should be able to find it. you also don't need to sent it back to the US for replacement, just take it to a local import phone dealer (where i got mine) and they should be able to deal with it for you.