I did try to resave the settings. That didn't help.
Also, was using phpmyadmin to look at the DB but couldn't see the actual text(maybe I'm doing it wrong >.< ) just the names & slugs etc. like so: pll_5318472f26d18. On the other hand, in Notepad I could see all the text so I managed to pull the translations out from there and re-enter them on the Strings Translation tab.
Fine. Saved that but now something else is happening :-/ Immediately after saving, the language switcher appears to have stopped working properly. I can view the site in one language and switch to the other two but then it gets "stuck" on one language despite multiple clicking attempts on the language selector. Reproduced the issue in another browser also.
I checked Polylang settings and unchecked the option to determine language from browser settings. That didn't help.