And – I’ve run a test and this brings up, that the mechanism described in https://codex.buddypress.org/translations/ seem to work not correctly. The .mo-file in the language/buddypress/-folder is only used if there’s no .mo-file in the language/plugin/-folder.
Yes, I can upload an avatar image without problems (but I can remember, that’s I’ve has had a problem with this and the cover-image was loaded without problems) and I don’t use anything like Amazon S3 or CDN. In <wp-uploaddir, which is set in WP-config>buddypress/members/<userid>/cover-image I can find 5a057ea758c30-bp-cover-image.png, which is the image that I want to be the cover.