I guess you were asking whether the newly compiled Python binary is able to build extension modules or not? I rebased PR 139 against the latest git master and seems it's fine. Running `make distclean`, `./configure` and then `make` builds all modules as expected. The result is the same on Travis CI and Appveyor.
About "elegant": I guess the only issue regarding elegancy in my patch is the local import in GNUTranslations._parse(). For me moving setup.py away from deprecated modules is a good reason for introducing local imports. Does it sound OK?