List selection translation

When translating a profile field I have for 'country' I can enter a translated string for each value. The problem is if there is no need for this or it is too much work (I'm not translating however many countries into Hebrew!)... I left all the translation fields of the selections empty and saved, but when I wanted to create a new user the select box shown was empty. Oops.
In the end I just ran
update i18n_profile_fields set options='';
in the database, and now it seems to be working. Still, it shouldn't save anything in the options in this case!

Rachel