well that couldn't have been easier, but as suspected, I can do anything and everything in that folder...
Are we stuck now?
I guess I can improvise and when I need to work on my widgets, I'll just deactivate polylang, work on the widgets page and activate the plugin again afterwards...
Maybe at some point one of the plugin updates will alleviate the problem... If not, I can always look for another language plugin, I just don't want to at this point...
Thanks for all your help. If you think of anything else, please let me know. I'll leave this topic as 'not resolved'...