But one advantage of automated translations is that there shouldn't have to be a pivot language.

And in any case, for German->Japanese, going through English probably has a lower cost. But for Hindi->Nepali, you'll lose a lot of information as Hindi and Nepali are closely related and similar not only in terms of correspondences between vocabulary items, but also grammatical structures, which is effectively 'thrown away' if there's an English, or close-enough-to-English-to-effectively-be-English intermediate translation language. (Not to mention the inefficiencies of the equivalent of sending a package from Delhi to Kathmandu via London.....)

I think in the case of automated translations it's a function of training data and confidence rather than cost. If you don't have a corpus of translation data for the source/target language combination to draw from, you're essentially forced into a pivot model.

To be frank, the Hindi<->English and Nepali<->English translation results are pretty poor to start with.