Thanks for helping
The problem is changing the lng value does not affect what appears on the register page when a user selects a country with no states.
No matter what I still get Other. Even if I hard code what I want in the states.tpl file I still get other
I went another way and in the countries table I turned off states for the countries that don't have states and now when a user selects a country with no states the states filed changes to a message that says "there are no states available for this country" and the correct value that I have in the lang table now is what is given to the customers state value
So it's working now!