The philosophy is this: If your site is mono linguistic, why bother to load dozens of translations that you're not using at all?
It is quite easy to use. Just give the environment variable PTS_LANGUAGES a list of translation domains you are interested in. An example. I prefer a site to speak Danish, so I include this in the zope.conf of an instance:
<environment>It works with Plone 3.1.1 - I don't know about earlier releases.
PTS_LANGUAGES da
</environment>