Since translation, at least for me, is supposed to be a learning exercise, I don’t go straight to a translator. I’ll lookup kanji I don’t know on jisho.org, and then with grammar, I start by looking through, “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar”. If that doesn’t suffice, I’ll paste the sentence into ichi.moe. And only after trying to tease out the meaning for an extended period of time will I drop it into DeepL (which I like better than Google translate).
All my translation is done on google docs with a photo, from my phone, of a manga page, and translations to the right of the photo. Allows me to zoom easily to actually read the print as well.
Recently I kind of hit a churn wall with WaniKani and in order to try to improve my grammar and aid in retention of vocab I decided at least one context sentence needed to be surfaced in reviews, and so I wrote Simple Show Context Sentence I’m finding it’s not a cheat, and I’m slowing down, and parsing out sentences. So far I think it’s helpful, and it’s not so obtrusive as to be unable to be ignored.