@ned - It seems like it is probably too late to undo this, but IMO this does seem like a bad thing for the long-term future of Steem. Do we want to end up with a separate blockchain and currency for each language?
I don't know how 'technically easy' this is, but one alternative you should consider is to keep Steem as the foundation currency but have 'forks' of different "Steem Powers". I wrote about it here in this article, although at the time I wrote it - it talked about more things to split over than just languages. It definitely applies to this scenario though, and could be limited to just language splits if we didn't want to introduce more splits than that.