Comment 1 for bug 421441

At the moment, we don't want to allow locking of translations (until we spend more time figuring out the right privilege model for doing translations).

For instance, that metacity template you linked to might actually have modifications specific to Ubuntu: if we allow locking it, some teams might decide to do it without understanding the consequences and it would result in incomplete translations. Thus, we can't properly introduce locking without first figuring out which bits are Ubuntu specific and which are not.

Work-around for the problem you are currently facing is to limit access to ubuntu-l10n-fr team to only established reviewers, and to make sure that communication happens between team members (so they understand what they can or cannot do).