The premise
Maybe your legal text must not be machine-translated. Maybe your poetry dies in translation. Maybe you just don't care about the roughly three quarters of humanity that doesn't read English. The web platform will let you decline translation. It asks only that you do it declaratively, so the refusal is clean instead of broken.
The mechanisms
1. The translate attribute (the standard)
HTML's global translate attribute marks content as
not-for-translation. It inherits, so one attribute on the root
covers the page:
<html lang="en" translate="no">2. The Google meta tag (the legacy belt to the suspenders)
Predates the standard attribute; still honored by Google's tooling. Use both.
<meta name="google" content="notranslate"/>3. Tell the truth in lang
Opting out does not excuse you from declaring your language.
lang="en" still drives screen reader pronunciation,
hyphenation, quotes, and font selection. An opt-out page with no
lang is not principled; it's sloppy twice.
4. The HTTP layer (optional)
A Content-Language: en response header states the
audience language for the whole response. It complements, not
replaces, the markup above.
The surgical version: opt out selectively
The defensible use of translate="no" is scoped:
protect the tokens that must survive verbatim and let every other
sentence travel.
<p>Run <code translate="no">npm install</code> to begin.</p>
<p>Email <span translate="no">support@terra.example</span>.</p>
<p><span translate="no">Terra Outfitters</span> ships worldwide.</p>Good candidates: brand names, product codes, code samples, commands, email addresses, legal terms of art. Bad candidates: your navigation, your prose, your error messages, your prices.
What you are actually choosing
| You gain | You give up |
|---|---|
| Exact control of wording | Every reader who needed the translation |
| No machine-translation errors attributed to you | Reach, links, and search visibility in other locales |
| A clean refusal instead of a broken experience | The "world wide" part of the value proposition |
Note what is not on offer: opting out will not fix a page built from concatenated fragments, canvas text, and label-sniffing JavaScript. That page fails translators and screen readers and your own future redesign. The opt-out is a policy decision; the broken page is just a defect with an ideology.
The better refusal
If machine translation genuinely misrepresents your content,
the strongest move is to say so and offer an alternative:
publish real translations for your top locales, link them with
hreflang, and scope translate="no" to
what must stay verbatim. A refusal plus an alternative is a
design. A refusal alone is a wall.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="/es/"/>
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="/"/>