This is definitely a problem that can occur, but for the one I was thinking of originally when writing the comment, we had pretty much all the resources available: the company sold internationally, so already had plenty of access to high-quality translators, and the application we were building was in-house, so we could go and ask the teams themselves if the translations made sense. More importantly, the need was also clearly there - many of the users of the application were seasonal workers, often older and less well-educated, in countries where neither English nor German were particularly relevant languages. Giving buttons labels in our users' languages meant they could figure out what they needed to do much more quickly, rather than having to memorise button colours and positions.

You're right that sometimes translation for technical terms is difficult, but the case I experienced far more often was Germans creating their own English words, or guessing at phrases they thought ought to exist because their English was not as good at they believed.

I agree that high quality translations are hard, and particularly difficult to retrofit into an existing application. But unless you have a very specialised audience, they're usually worth it!