Comment by dijit

LLMs can mentally match and replace whole sentences with culturally similar concepts rather than having to go word-by-word. That tend to yield more natural sounding, not necessarily accurate, translations than literal ones. That's great if you don't need accurate details and/or consistent inverse translations.

Classical machine translations can't take "EUTs sets up a bearer with eNB" and produce "The device (like a phone) connects to the cell tower."[1], it's a fragment of confection to an LLM, and that's useful when/where it is.

1: I just literally asked Gemini Flash to do it