Reddit translation failure

Hey dora - great rant, and the questions are legit, so let me actually answer them.

Is Google Translate "the most advanced AI system in the world"?
No. It's a very mature, very specialised system, but "most advanced AI" overall belongs to general-purpose LLMs (Gemini, GPT, Claude, that family). Within its own lane - translation - Google Translate is genuinely state-of-the-art, though for European languages many translators actually prefer DeepL. So the "most advanced" title really depends on what you're measuring.

How was Google Translate made? Quick history:

• 2006 - launched as statistical machine translation (SMT): phrase-based, crunching huge aligned bilingual corpora (UN documents, EU parliament, books) with n-gram statistics. No deep learning at all - pure math on parallel text.
• 2016 - switched to GNMT, an end-to-end neural network: encoder + decoder with attention (LSTM-based). That was the big jump; it stopped translating phrase-by-phrase and started modelling whole sentences.
• ~2018 onwards - LSTMs replaced by the Transformer architecture, and eventually merged into one giant multilingual model that can even translate between language pairs it never saw paired in training ("zero-shot").
• Plus the tricks that made it cheap and good: back-translation (exploiting monolingual text as pseudo-training data), byte-pair tokenization, and human-feedback signals ("is this translation useful?" buttons, the Translate Community).

So today it's basically a huge Transformer trained on hundreds of billions of tokens of parallel + monolingual text, with heavy serving optimisation so billions of requests stay near-free.

Now your actual bug: the Dutch nonsense. Both of your takes are right, and they explain each other:

• Per-message translation without thread context is the core failure. A sentence-level model can't know what "it", "they" or "that thing" refers to, can't pick the correct gendered word in Dutch, and flattens idioms and register. Research on context-aware NMT consistently shows document context resolves exactly these pronoun/coherence errors - yet almost every deployed system still translates sentence-by-sentence because it's simpler, faster, and easier to cache.
• "It looks Dutch but I can't understand it" is the signature of neural MT failure. Modern models are so fluent they produce perfectly grammatical nonsense, and you can't tell it's wrong by ear. That's arguably worse than old word-for-word garbage, which was at least transparently wrong.
• "Mass operation, light tech" - correct. At Reddit's scale they run a fast, small model with sentence-level batching and a near-zero latency/cost budget. The cost per translation basically has to be a rounding error, so you get the cheapest model that passes their internal eval, not the best one.

Why Dutch specifically? Almost certainly not the model's "choice" - it's the pipeline. Likely candidates: (1) Reddit's language detector mis-fires on short slangy comments, (2) your display-language / translation-target setting got flipped to Dutch (Reddit separates those two, and that setting has a history of bugs), or (3) an A/B experiment overriding your locale. Practical fixes: check Settings → display language, turn off auto-translate, and if it keeps happening, extensions like redditUntranslate or "Remove Reddit Automatic Translations" strip the language params from URLs so you always get the original text.

On "if you can do it without AI, always do it without AI - hybrid is the way": agreed, with one caveat - translation is one of the few domains where pure ML genuinely beats every rule-based alternative. But the best systems are hybrid exactly the way you say: glossary enforcement (the model may not touch brand names or jargon), named-entity protection, translation memory for repeated segments, ICU rules for plurals, never translating code/URLs, and - the big one - feeding the model the previous N messages as context instead of one comment in isolation. That's the difference between a translation you have to re-read twice and one you can just read. Reddit shipping sentence-level Dutch garbage is a cost decision, not a technology limit.

TL;DR: Google Translate is a giant Transformer with ~20 years of data-harvesting and serving optimisation behind it - impressive, but not "the most advanced AI in the world". Your feed is broken because of missing thread context + a cheap model + a locale bug, and yes, a hybrid pipeline (rules + context + memory) fixes most of it. And turn off auto-translate until Reddit fixes their language detection. 😄