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Raised as a usability problem by 19 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 19 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Translations come out as gibberish with invented wordsUnreviewed
20112026- Translations come out as unusable gibberish with invented words2025-03-07
- Translation app is completely unusable for real back-and-forth conversation2023-12-11
- Translations silently garble meaning, and users can't tell when they've failed2020-09-28
Cannot translate a YouTube page in FirefoxUnreviewed
20112026- Opening the website redirects to the app, which lacks the document translation feature2026-04-06
- Couldn't get Google Translate to translate a YouTube page in Firefox2019-08-22
- Must click to disable a Safe Mode translation feature before viewing the page2013-07-27
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 18 complaints
- Selected language pair not updated until animation finishes, so quick taps are missed2026-04-10
- Opening the website redirects to the app, which lacks the document translation feature2026-04-06
- Translated documents lose layout, forcing manual reflow of fonts, tables and slides2026-03-10
- Translations come out as unusable gibberish with invented words2025-03-07
- Can't get past cookie consent dialogs, so user must copy and paste page content2024-11-07
- Translation app is completely unusable for real back-and-forth conversation2023-12-11
- Virtual line breaks from the textbox corrupt translations of Chinese text2021-08-11
- Pop-up dialogs appear over hover menus, so the user can't inspect them; interface is slow and clunky2020-11-18
- Translations silently garble meaning, and users can't tell when they've failed2020-09-28
- Two very different icons, a snake and a pen, are hard to tell apart in meaning2019-10-09
- Couldn't get Google Translate to translate a YouTube page in Firefox2019-08-22
- Interaction animations make the app feel slower and distracting to use2015-06-10
- App is difficult and slow to use; textbox no longer focuses after tapping clear2015-01-14
- Must click to disable a Safe Mode translation feature before viewing the page2013-07-27
- Translations of Japanese are unusable beyond one or two words2013-03-02
- Camera scan of Cyrillic menu returns gibberish, so translation can't be attempted2012-09-24
- Hover popup appears over the text and looks like broken, intrusive advertising2011-05-07
- Speech recognition fails to catch basic Spanish phrases even for native speakers2011-02-08