While I'm aware this is a case of "you're holding it wrong" – !translate <phrase> should do the trick. And that's not an excuse for not having better detection for when an info box should exist, because they do have them, especially for, but not limited to the WolframAlpha integration stuff. (For example, a friend and fellow user was awed when searching "internet speed test" and saw it integrated, no idea if Google has that too though).

Other than that, make sure your region/locale is set correctly (I'm not getting the metric petaton, for example), and for everything else, they have an excellent feedback forum for suggestions/bug reports.

> make sure your region/locale is set correctly

Last time I checked (which admitedly has been a few months, but I haven't seen anything in the changelog/announcements that make me belive things got better), that's not a viable option.

I always keep it as "International" (luckily that's an option!), as setting it to "German" significantly degrades the results as for e.g. technical topics it will rank many rubish German results higher than they should be. Google still has a significant edge in getting the distinction right between regional and technical expertise and how they relate to language.