How Temu Disables Google Translate

My mum loves browsing the Chinese e-commerce store Temu but a big gripe she has is that Google translate doesn't work on the website. I was quite baffled at this issue and thought it might've been a bug in Google translate or something. But then I skimmed an entry on the HTMHell advent calender and it mentions how the translate attribute can be "used to indicate whether an element should be translated or not." My synapses fired and I wondered if this was the reason Google translate refuses to translate Temu. I viewed the source code of the website and grepped for all instance of the phrase "translate" and lo and behold, among the irrelevant CSS properties, we find a single line of JavaScript code that disables translation for all elements.

document.documentElement.translate = false;

A solution/workaround is trivial. For example, a simple Tampermonkey script can be used to counteract the code. Also, the Microsoft Outlook email interface suffers from the same problem because the document html tag has the translate=no attribute—which can be overwrote with the same workaround.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Enable Translation
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      2023-12-18
// @description  enable Google translate on Temu & Outlook
// @author       Kevin Cao
// @match        https://www.temu.com/*
// @match        https://outlook.live.com/mail/*
// @icon         https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=temu.com
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

    document.documentElement.translate = true;
})();