Better question is why the Google app exists. It's just a platform for kitchen sink projects that they could not be bothered to wrap a whole app around.

Because google will a/b test(maybe unintentionally) products and eventually kill or merge them, great example now is using voice to have google help you vs gemini essentially both voice helpers.

To get wider audience? Don’t know why they want that. Some audio data collecting?

Search, Assistant, Google, Gemini, ... It's all gSiri

"Do one thing well", a common Linux design philosophy, was blatantly ignored here. Search is not the place for this, sibling comment is likely right about trying to reach wider audience.

Claude.ai and chatGPT have become my go to for translation over Google Translate, they provide better idiomatic context. They aren't perfect for code, but I can chat with them in target languages (outside of English) and they're pretty fluent.