Comment by phire

For some important context, The "Attention is all you need" paper that established the transformer architecture that most LLMs use, is a paper about explicitly machine translation.

It the idea of using transformers for non-translation tasks was only briefly explored at the end of the paper. So it really shouldn't be surprising that LLMs are still good at translating.

Yes, the hallucinations are less than ideal, but the extra freedom is part of what makes their translation abilities so good when they do get it right. And it's not look google translate is completely free of "hallucination" type issues. It's well known that dedicated machine translation models will assume (aka hallucinate) genders when going from non-gendered to gendered languages.