It may be a case of Google lagging behind others yeah, I’m not overly familiar with translators other than as a casual user. WeChat is very “smoothed” in that it gives you something that makes grammatical sense and sounds native, in preference to being a direct translation. Which usually works really well but occasionally gives hilarious results. It also seems to take the context of the conversation into account rather than just the message you’re translating.

Are you sure about that? I think DeepL was ahead for a brief time after it was released, but Google Translate has caught up.

For me it's absolutely night and day, the translations produced by Deepl feel like they could have been written by a real person. That real person wouldn't be a particularly good writer, but, still, it's highly readable.

I could see myself reading a whole book through Deepl if I had a reason.

Yeah, I take that back. DeepL is better (again), although it is highly dependent on which languages you translate and which context.

Quite impressive, especially that DeepL (and every other machine translation application) makes use of research done at Google.