Hi Paul,
Thanks for your post here. In that past around the time of the most recent post of the Microsoft forum you referenced above, there was a security update that disabled Google Translate from working at all. I thought it would be months before that would ever get fixed, but quickly Microsoft fixed the issue and I’m not aware of any issues at this current time.
I’m a little confused at the statement, “I’m finding that translation only works on the visible area of the page”. If you can explain in more detail what you mean, I can definitely help find the answer.
My suggestion would be to install the plugin and try it out of the box, and then if you want to share with me a link to the site, we can configure the plugin to do whatever needed, if possible.
You can contact me here directly, if you want to keep your website link private:
http://wp-studio.net/contact/
Thanks for the questions!
Rob Myrick