Exactly. They could do it, because a large publisher would pay for that kind of stuff. As a results, books were ridiculously expensive. I got mine from libraries, because buying them was just not feasible... consequently, a lot of material never got translated. So, is it better to have a bad translation than none at all? On the other hand, all my friends in college were just fine reading original English works as well (but obviously, say, an Italian novel would've stymied all but one.)

This is happening a lot in apps. They get machine-translated, or localized by sketchy operations. The app publisher doesn't know any better, until customers start to demand refunds or make fun of the ridiculous mistakes... and even then, a small publisher of a small app really has very little they can do, since they can't exactly hire a company to redo the whole thing for real money for a small market. (Or, in the case of FB, which I keep in Finnish partially for amusement value, the conjugations are either wrong or non-existent. It's tough to go into agglutinating languages.)