I wouldn't be surprised if high-volume translations weren't hand-tweaked by a human to iron out mistranslations. In fact, I would be very surprised if Google didn't had a human in the loop to handle these usecases. They already rely on end-users to fix translation issues on their own.

Nope, I doubt that this translation is somehow more tweaked than other translations: Last year around this time I was shopping to import a dutch car. As a German native speaker I find dutch to be pretty well readable with some practice, but I sometimes double checked on Google Translate - and the translation were always excellent. (But reading Durch as a German is actually quite funny, so I prefered that).

However, the user-supplied fixes have probably been a huge contributing factor to getting the translations where they're today. And Googlers reviewing some translations for their training data sets ;)

Being an English speaker living in The Netherlands, I rely heavily on Google Translate. Works near perfect for formal/semi-formal writing. Short form sentences & phrases (as you might find in casual emails), not so much.

I recently had a similar experience when I came across DeepL [1].

I believe it was French to Dutch. The result was basically perfect.

[1] https://www.deepl.com/translator

The structure of English and Dutch sentences is often very similar. There is a glaring error right in the title though: “ Scientists Rotterdam and Utrecht claim discovery...”