I've seen this comment but can't square it with the LLM-induced outcry from translators over job loss.

We've all pasted news articles into 2022 Google Translate and a modern LLM, right, and there was no comparison? LLMs even crushed DeepL. Satya had this little story his PR folks helped him with (j/k) even, via Wired June '23:

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STEVEN LEVY: "Was there a single eureka moment that led you to go all in?"

SATYA NADELLA: "It was that ability to code, which led to our creating Copilot. But the first time I saw what is now called GPT-4, in the summer of 2022, was a mind-blowing experience. There is one query I always sort of use as a reference. Machine translation has been with us for a long time, and it's achieved a lot of great benchmarks, but it doesn't have the subtlety of capturing deep meaning in poetry. Growing up in Hyderabad, India, I'd dreamt about being able to read Persian poetry—in particular the work of Rumi, which has been translated into Urdu and then into English. GPT-4 did it, in one shot. It was not just a machine translation, but something that preserved the sovereignty of poetry across two language boundaries. And that's pretty cool."

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edit: this comment has some comparisons incl. w/the old Google Translate I'm referring to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40243219

Today Google Translate is Gemini, though maybe that's not the "traditional translation tool" you were referencing... but hope there's enough here to discuss any aspect that might be interesting!

edit2: March 2025 comparison-

https://lokalise.com/blog/what-is-the-best-llm-for-translati...

"falling behind LLM-based solutions", "consistently outperformed by LLMs", "Not matching top LLMs"