Change Google Translate dropdown programmatically

On a site I tried adding the Google Translate dropdown using the following code:

function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({
    pageLanguage: 'en'
  }, 'google_translate_element');
}

<script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>

When you select from the dropdown that the google script inserts, a Google Translate bar appears at the top of the page, and all text is translated in to the selected language.

However if I try and trigger the dropdown change using JavaScript, it doesn't work:

$('.goog-te-combo').val('fr')

'French' is selected from the dropdown, however Google Translate is not triggered.

Why o why does it not work? I've also tried:

$('.goog-te-combo').trigger('click')
$('.goog-te-combo').change()

UPDATE: FYI this is not my site. I was using the Chrome console to load jQuery and execute the jQuery methods.