[rahimnathwani]

> If you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "TaoBao."

LOL! That's exactly the answer I would give you :)

> Images have critical text that isn't translated

This is mostly down to the vendors themselves, who define the text and images that show on the item listing.

> often the page loads elements after translation has finished

Yes, you can't parse a Taobao page before waiting for JavaScript stuff to complete. I believe this is in large part to thwart scraping.

> I wonder how much effort .. to .. smooth out the experience

I'm sure they have the engineering capability to do it. They've built an amazing site (experience, scalability, reliability) and developed some cutting-edge stuff to do it (like tengine). The thing is, why would you make your site easier for robots to parse, thereby increasing your costs and polluting the data you use for analytics?