LLMs are sequence-to-sequence like language translation models, were invented for the purpose of language models, and if you were making a translator today it would be structured like an LLM but might be small and specialized.

For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:

  I'm replying to ... and want to say ... in a way that is compatible in tone

  I didn't expect to see ... what does that mean?

  When the story says ... how is that written in Japanese?