If I want a machine translation of something, I can throw the text into DeepL myself. Getting text that was machine translated Japanese<->English with no access to the original is pretty much never what I want, and yet sites insist on doing it based on my IP address or system language.

Also, if a website offers a language I take that as an indication that the organization is prepared to deal with speakers of that language/people from the country in question (customer support, shipping, regional/legal concerns). Whether the site offers a certain language is a useful signal to figure this out quickly, and if poking around reveals machine translation into dozens of languages, it's a signal that they're probably not prepared to provide reliable services/support.

In some cases, yes. A non-native but passable speaker/reader of English might prefer to struggle through the English UI themselves than deal with your bad AI-generated translation. If they do it themselves, at least they can skip the parts they know, see multiple possible translations, and take advantage of their partial knowledge of the UI language. If you dump everything into an LLM with no knowledge of your target languages at all, you’re setting yourself up for disaster when a critical string is mistranslated.

There are some passionate naysayers in here.

I love "Translate this page" in Chrome, better than nothing.

Yes, very much so.

If you're bilingual you must know this feeling of reading an awful translation; of knowing someone wanted to offer their product to people speaking your language but couldn't be bothered to do it well, and so used google translate and called it a day, thinking those dumb users won't notice the slop they're feeding them. Fuck that.

Yes.