LLMs were not available in 2021, but "Google translate" is much older.

Such translations were not unusual.

Around 2017 to 2019 I used a lot "Google translate", because it saved time despite its flaws, but there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".

In each sentence I had to change at least a word or two, and many were hilarious. This was for translations between English and German. I assume that for other more distant languages the translations must have been much worse.

LLMs were absolutely available in 2021; the architecture is from 2017 and stuff like GPT-2 and BERT had been around for years. Conversational assistants, ie. ChatGPT, started in 2022.