babel: babel@toc causing problem

Question

• I have a bilingual document.
• The main language is English.
• Throughout the document, I switch between the two languages.
• I have noticed that babel writes language-specific commands in the toc file (e. g. \babel@toc {english}{}).
• I provide an artificial MWE, see below. The actual document is Chinese and English.
• Where the trouble begins...: In my real use case I use \today in the footline of the document.
• Problem: In the footline of the toc chapter, the \today command produces (randomly) different outputs (language-specific).
• Question: Can I prevent that \babel@toc is written to the toc file?

---

Content of the toc file.

\babel@toc {english}{}
\babel@toc {english}{}
\contentsline {section}{\numberline {1}English}{1}% 
\babel@toc {spanish}{}
\contentsline {section}{\numberline {2}Spanish}{1}% 
\babel@toc {english}{}
\contentsline {section}{\numberline {3}English}{1}% 

---

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[spanish, english]{babel}

\begin{document}

\tableofcontents

%% English -------------------------
\selectlanguage{english}

\section{English}

Test \today

%% Spanish -------------------------
\selectlanguage{spanish}

\section{Spanish}

Test \today

%% English -------------------------
\selectlanguage{english}

\section{English}

Test \today

\end{document}

---

Even when I use

\begin{otherlanguage}{english}
    Text.
\end{otherlanguage}

and

\begin{otherlanguage}{spanish}
    Text.
\end{otherlanguage}

the problem occurs.