Mооnst@r
The ability to disable auto-translation globally without providing a translation at all undermines the very purpose of this feature — it can already be turned off by simply clicking the manual translation button.
The issue here is different: if the author believes their thread doesn't belong on the .net (English-language) domain and wants to restrict it to a Russian-speaking audience, that's another matter — such a checkbox could be added, and the thread simply wouldn't be displayed to those who don't know Russian, overall.
The feature is designed for the convenience of those who don't know Russian and works better than just pasting the text into Google Translate, since it provides context, topic, and message section, as well as a jargon dictionary for different versions of Heroes.
Otherwise, a person who doesn't know Russian would be left with the option of pasting the text into Google Translate or a similar translator. That is, the translation process would still happen, just less conveniently and with even lower quality.
Here we need to decide: what are we trying to achieve? What problem are we solving?
What about performance when navigating between sections, reading threads, and so on? Is all of this done with every transition and refresh? And I don't see a "manual translation" button. Again, you have to go digging somewhere to find it.