Unable to override default translation publishing status using entity_translation module
I ended up posting this to the module issue queue and got this suggested code:

function MODULE_entity_translation_insert($entity_type, $entity, $translation, $values = array()) {
  // Set the publishing status for en-us to 0.
  if ($translation['language'] == 'en-us') {
    $translation['status'] = 0;
    $handler = entity_translation_get_handler($entity_type, $entity);
    $handler-&gt;setTranslation($translation);
    // Important: Avoid infinite loops by firing the insert hook again and again.
    $handler-&gt;getTranslations()-&gt;hook = array();
    $handler-&gt;saveTranslations();
  }
}


which was pretty close to what I had come up with on my own:

function mymodule_entity_insert($entity, $type) {
  // We don't want to do this for field collections. 
   if (in_array($type, array('node', 'taxonomy_term'))) {
    // Attempt to unpublish the en-us translation that is set to published by default.
    $handler = entity_translation_get_handler($type, $entity);
    $translations = $handler-&gt;getTranslations();
    $enus_translation = $translations-&gt;data['en-us'];
    // Set the status = 0.
    $enus_translation['status'] = 0;
    $handler-&gt;setTranslation($enus_translation);
    // Save the translation.
    $handler-&gt;saveTranslations();
  }
}


And since it's not part of the saveTranslations() hook firing logic, no infinite loops should occur.