You can pronounce written Spanish words without knowing what they mean. However, I imagine that most people actually want to know what they are reading.

Also true, although you could get the pronounciation very wrong. It happens to be a few time with English. Regardless, being able to read it make it easier. For example, search for "industria" is easier than searching for "業界", especially for text on a picture. Google translate's OCR is not great, and reproducing the drawings to get a translation is painful and takes a lot of time.