Dude, just take a 10% diplomacy bonus and build the diplomatic translators, and you should be able to not only pee on the AIs collective legs and tell them it's raining, in terms of tech trades, but make a fortune selling them umbrellas.
The ideal situation, starting from a position where you're behind technologically, but gave a good-to-excellent diplomacy bonus:
Step 1.) Find an alien race with weaker diplomatic skills than you and roughly equal, but different, technology. Trade all of your stuff for all of their stuff.
Step 2.) Find an different alien race that still has stuff you don't. Trade all of your tech for all of their tech.
Repeat until technological parity is acheived!
This breaks down a little in terms of military technology, which is disporportionatly expensive to trade for, plus subject to other limitations like the computer (or you, if you're smart) not wanting to trade it to a potential enemy. But the thing about military technology is also that you don't need it all. There are many legitimate combinations of weapons, armor, ship size, miniturazation and logistics, and you only need enough to beat whoever you're fighting right now.
Aaaaannnd you don't want to trade away cultural or diplomatic techs too freely, or anything that would let the computer build a unique acheivement before you, obviously
But since there are a lot of techs, and different AIs tend to research different ones, there are still a lot of options. Plus there are technologies you WANT the computer to have, like Trade or Alliances, and if you research them first, you can sell them to everybody, which is just awesome.
But if all that sounds tooth-grindingly boring, then yeah, you turn off tech trading.
