It’s a nice feature, except for the small problem that pages it was offering to translate were already in English.

It seems Google had decided, somehow, that my native language was Spanish. I’m not sure where it got this from, but it’s wrong.

So I told it my native language was English, and it went away.

Until the next time I restarted the browser. At which point it started doing it again.

Once again my native language was Spanish. So I changed it back to English and, for good measure, told it never to translate pages that are already in English.

So we co-existed peacefully for an hour or so, until I closed my browser and reopened it. It again started offering to translate English pages for me. Sure enough, it thought I was a Spanish speaker again. I turned that back to English, told it never to translate from English again, and for good measure, turned the entire feature off.

Would you care to guess what happened next?

The next time I started my browser, it gratuitously offered to translate from English again. No amount of turning this feature off worked.

So I uninstalled it instead!

Google has more than 10,000 employees worldwide. A significant number of them are programmers and IT support staff. Impressive, isn’t it?