Neither Google translate or DeepL seem to be good at translating Japanese to English, so this is hardly a surprise to me. In the case of Japanese, only an LLM

Neither Google translate or DeepL seem to be good at translating Japanese to English, so this is hardly a surprise to me. In the case of Japanese, only an LLM seems to be capable of tracking the gender of a fictional character, and since gender is rarely indicated in the original japanese language, Google Translate will alternate every sentence indicating whether "He" or "she" took action when referring to the same character. This is just the tip of the iceberg in the problems that come up when trying to translate Japanese. LLM's on the other hand have awareness of the "content" -- they understand what is happening in the original story and it auds their translation choices -- and LLMs tend to be superior at novel translation in general. I imagine the non LLM tools work much better translating between similar languages.