As others have noted, it doesn't seem to be fully language-aware outside of English. For example, if you ask it to write a poem or a song in English, it will usually make something that rhymes (or you can specifically demand that). But if you do the same for Russian, the result will not rhyme, even when specifically requested, and despite the model claiming that it does. If you ask it to explain what exactly the rhymes are, it will get increasingly nonsensical from there.
I wonder if that has something to do with sentence structure also being wrong. Given that English was predominant in the training corpus, I wonder if the resulting model "thinks" in English, so to speak - i.e. that some part of the resulting net is basically a translator, and the output of that is ultimately fed to the nodes that handle the correlation of tokens if you force it to talk in other languages.
What amazes me (and that you hint at) is that it still manages to pick more appropriate word/phrase choices, most of the time, even compared to dedicated translation software. I get the feeling (and I fully admit, this is just a feeling) that it's not using English, or any other language, as a pivot, but that there's some higher-dimensionality translation going on that allows it to perform as well as it does.
https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...