Yeah this is my experience with DeepL as well. It might (sometimes) do better than Google Translate with lone sentences, but give it a few paragraphs and it'll entirely ignore some, and other times it starts repetitively rambling about stuff not even in the original text, quite frequently cars/houses/money.

I didn't say that DeepL is better than LLMs only that DeepL is miles better than Google ;). And yeah, I also noticed DeepL sometimes misses some words when translating Japanese (it just ignores them). Google is so much worse though, because it translates Japanese through English (if the target language is not English). DeepL gets better when you have a lot of text.

Point is that Google Translate hasn't been #1 since DeepL launched. But now LLMs are (obviously) much better with the added bonus that they can also break down sentences for you.