Hi Leo!
I’m curious, how did you discover that your participant used an automatic translation extension?
I think all the solutions you list are quite ingenious. If you don’t mind showing text as images as your mention of screenshots seems to suggest (note that it would mean constant printing size on the screen, irrespective of the participant’s window size/resolution) then using the HTML canvas could be a good idea (not to be confused with PennController’s Canvas element). You can print text onto it using fillText and extensions should be blind to it.
I guess you could also use the intrusive character method, but how to best implement it would depend on how the extension works.
I’m not sure there would be a unique, ideal solution to implement as a feature of PennController for future releases. But really, I don’t how prevalent this problem is. I don’t recall noticing participants using an automatic translation tool (though I could have been fooled over and over again). Hopefully any such participant eventually gets filtered out by my exclusion criteria when it comes to data analysis. I guess getting a sense of how serious a problem it is would help you see whether it’s worth spending the time and effort coming up with and implementing a preventive solution.
Let me know if you need help with the canvas method and I can try to work something out for you.
Jeremy