A quick followup:
Strictly speaking, you don't even need that .properties file, if you are running an English-only installation with no additional language customizations. If the .properties file isn't installed, Dataverse will default to the description labels in the .tsv file itself. If you ever need to change these labels - it's your block, you can change the .tsv and reimport it.
The only problem with this, as currently implemented - you will be seeing a lot of "properties file not found" warning noise in your log files...
So, you actually have 3 options to choose from:
1. Install the .properties file in the application dir. (requires a Payara restart, I believe).
2. Skip the properties file, and simply ignore the noise in your server log.
3. Skip the properties file and lower the logging level for edu.harvard.iq.dataverse.ControlledVocabularyValue.
We are planning to clean up/improve this area going forward - by getting rid of the excessive logging in single-language environments; and by documenting the whole thing more clearly.
-L.A.