It was precisely "at a time when there was no google translator" that governments, and especially colonial French and British related governments, notorious for it, had a great supply of bureucrats, bilingual employees, and lower staff versed in both languages, supplementary translators, local spys, native aristocracy, allies, and enforcers, and even whole swaths of scholars studing the occupied cultures...

You are overstating how much the French or even the British could do in Africa during that period. 99% of what they had was just brute force coercion.