Translate is forbidden
Who said you can?
If you create a website in some language, and a visitor is visiting from one of the Chrome browsers; a nice bar alerts the user with the possibility to translate the page.
One opinion would be: "It's fine, this may increase the number of our visitors and widen our funnel." Another opinion: "No, that is totally distracting, it impacts the user-visit goals."
Whatever side you choose it's fine, you can continue reading. Non is wrong as it depends on the Audience, device used, industry or category of the website, the type of content and many other factors. For example: a marketplace; it might be interrupting users from a defined user Journey and impact visit goals such as signup, and user-conversions.
Enter meta
MDN defines metadata element as:
The
<meta>HTML element represents metadata that cannot be represented by other HTML meta-related elements.
In order to prevent google-translate from operating on our website by default you can the following to your HTML <head> tag.
<meta name="google" content="notranslate" />How does it really work?
This meta tag with value="notranslate" is one of many meta tags that Google robots understands
When Google recognizes that the contents of a page aren't in the language that the user is likely to want to read, Google often provides a link to a translation in the search results. In general, this gives you the chance to provide your unique and compelling content to a much larger group of users. However, there may be situations where this is not desired. This meta tag tells Google that you don't want us to provide a translation for this page.
That means, it won't just affect only the "Translate" bar, but more importantly it will impact the language of content shown when website appears in search.
Conclusion
Whether this is good or bad User experience, frustrating or not. It's something that is permitted! You can use it when needed. You're the judge on your choice in that case.
How do you do it in your business?