> This is caused by people active in English-speaking communities translating memes literally and spreading them in their native language communities as-is.

You're right that memes are getting translated literally and spreading, but in terms of pure volume, LLMs doing the translation dwarf humans doing the translation.

Building a bot that picks whatever posts are trending on Reddit/imgur/etc, automatically translates them, and then posts them in target languages on social networks is an easy way to accumulate likes+followers; then those high reach accounts get used to push whatever makes money.