"our vendor now matches the lightbox scripting to the language of the text on the webpage"
"The auto-translate pop-up may still be triggered on occasion, but the HTML in the survey wrapper prevents it from changing the content on the webpage."
I have no idea what either of these sentences mean, and they're both very important to the fix.
My guess (it would be nice if they actually said...) is that they were missing the required lang attribute on their HTML.
<html lang=en>
If not defined it will default to unknown (not to the user's locale) and so this makes Chrome guess. And there wasn't much text in the lightbox (which might be a different page?) for the browser to infer from.
That's probably true, however I'd be really curious to know why Chrome's guess for "yes" is the Spanish word for "Y-junctions" instead of the English word yes.
This was my immediate thought, but it doesn't sound like what they did. They also mention they still get the Google translate pop up - which suggests they didn't.
Though it sounds like they serve many languages, so they'd need to do each survey individually.
#1 is probably to subset the loaded lightbox text-localization files to only the survey language. And #2 is to use the translate=no HTML attribute (or its predecessor) to disable translation of that section.
Perhaps the article needs to be read as if prefixed with:
"I was asked to write the following explanation for the public, to put on our website, and talked to the programmers. I have idea what they were saying. I took some notes, which likewise mean nothing to me, but here goes ..."
"The auto-translate pop-up may still be triggered on occasion, but the HTML in the survey wrapper prevents it from changing the content on the webpage."
I have no idea what either of these sentences mean, and they're both very important to the fix.