What's new in Suga

We fixed several issues where Google Translate broke the Suga dashboard for users with auto-translate enabled in their browser.

The problem#

Google Translate works by walking the DOM and replacing `TextNode` elements with `<font>` elements containing the translated text. This is fundamentally incompatible with React, which maintains references to the original DOM nodes. When React tries to update or remove a node that Google Translate already replaced, two things happen:

1. Stale content: React updates its reference to the old `TextNode`, but that node is no longer in the DOM. The translated `<font>` element stays unchanged, so dynamic content like form values and status indicators stop updating.
2. Crashes: When React tries to call `removeChild` on a node that Google Translate already removed, it throws a `NotFoundError` that can crash the entire component tree.

Martijn Hols wrote an excellent deep dive on this exact issue, which informed our approach.

Our fix#

We took two approaches:

1. `translate="no"` attributes on interactive elements and dynamic content: dialog inputs, endpoint URLs, form fields, and status text that updates in real-time. This tells Google Translate to leave those nodes alone while still translating static UI labels and descriptions.

2. Wrapping conditional `TextNode`s in `<span>` elements. When React conditionally renders a text node (e.g., `{isLoading ? "Loading..." : "Done"}`), Google Translate can replace the bare `TextNode` before React swaps it out, causing the `removeChild` crash. Wrapping these in a `<span>` gives React a stable parent element to work with, which solved a large chunk of the crashes.

This is not a perfect solution (as the blog post explains, there is no complete fix for this incompatibility), but it protects the critical paths where stale or broken content would cause real problems.