technically most translation tools these days have an LLM inside. Just not the chat/completion LLM.

I think that Google initially came up with transformer architecture to use it for translation, so...

LLMs were -in part- designed as translation tools. It's one thing they do really really well.

https://arxiv.org/html/1706.03762v7 (Attention is all you need) "Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train."

Ok, looking that up, that was quite literally one of the main design goals.

And they're really quite good at translating between the languages I use. They're the best tool for the job.

Those are either AI based and worse performance if they are not.