Intracellular bacteria in the early stages of host adaptation often show extraordinarily disrupted genomes, where up to half of their ancestral genes are found in a pseudogenized state. The mealybug Pseudococcus longispinus hosts two bacterial endosymbionts with high pseudogene loads, Symbiopectobacterium endolongispinus and Sodalis endolongispinus. Here, we measure the transcriptional and translational responses of these bacterial symbionts to understand how bacteria avoid (or fail to avoid) making large amounts of non-functional RNAs and proteins from these pseudogenes. Consistent with previous work, we show that pseudogenes continue to be transcribed, but at lower levels compared to intact and functional genes. Also consistent with previous work, we show that few pseudogene transcripts are translated into stable proteins. However, we find that numerous pseudogene transcripts still bind to Symbiopectobacterium ribosomes, and uncover a possible role for the tmRNA ribosome rescue system in the targeting of pseudogene proteins for degradation. Our results suggest a possible mechanism by which bacterial endosymbionts remove aberrant pseudogene-derived proteins during the critical time when many pseudogenes have formed but not enough time has passed for sequence evolution to erode ribosome binding sites from pseudogene transcripts.