The translation overlay on camera feed feature of Google Translate is great, and it does not suffer from most of the problems I outlined in my original post. It is for a very different kind of use case though (it's more about solving the problem of "what does this menu/street sign say?", rather than trying to offer full conversation live translation)
Google Translate does have a feature where you can take a photo, OCR the text and translate it - https://support.google.com/translate/answer/6142483