Please do not do this! In almost every instance I've encountered severe Translate-related broken-ness, it's still worked well enough to get me a snapshot of the current page translated. Fighting through this is still less cumbersome than the alternatives.
> The only alternative solution that I can think of, is to implement your own localization within your app (i.e. internationalization)
I will add, please make sure that language is an independent setting, and not derived from locale! I sometimes have to use translate on sites that have my preferred language available, but won't show it to me because it's tied to locale and that changes other things that I don't want, like currency.
On one such site I used a browser extension to rewrite the request for the language strings file.