In my experience, with the amount of mistakes similar to the one in the OP, I strongly suspect that language is somehow unbelievably close (semantically) to English then.

I decided to quickly experiment with two languages I somewhat know, and got 3/3 incorrect translations consistent with English as intermediary:

• Russian ширинка (fly, meaning “zipper on your trousers”) -> Georgian ფრენა (to fly, as in “flight”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
• Russian парковаться (to park, as in “park your car”) -> Georgian პარკი (park, meaning “green space with trees”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary
• Russia лежать (to lie, as in “lie on your back”) -> Georgian ტყუილი (lie, as meaning “untruth”) - completely incorrect translation, consistent with English as intermediary

It makes exactly the same mistakes if you translate from Russian to Spanish and French too.

I don’t know if there are many other languages where “zipper on your trousers” and “flight”, “park your car” and “green space with trees”, “lie on your back” and “untruth” would all be pairwise the exact same word. I strongly suspect not, or at least it would be a language really close to English.

you’d think they would use embeddings nowadays instead, with all the llm hype going on

Very old article, they are absolutely just using llms nowdays

Edit: this is the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04558 the article is about