I asked Mistral to translate a Japanese government land price report into Dutch.
It didn't translate. It fabricated. Every Japanese reference was silently replaced with a Dutch equivalent: Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya became Randstad, Amsterdam, Utrecht. The Japanese Ministry of Land became the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure. Hokkaido and Nagano resorts became Zeeland and the Veluwe. Ginza, Tokyo became the Amsterdamse Zuidas. Foreign buyers in Japan became foreign buyers in the Netherlands.
The AI wrote a completely fictional Dutch economic report and presented it as a translation. Statistics, locations, market analysis -- all invented. All plausible. All wrong. A monolingual Dutch reader would never catch it. The output reads like a perfectly normal news article. Only someone who reads both Japanese and Dutch would notice that the entire article is about a different country.
And then the AI contradicted itself in the final sentence, still mentioning "the Yamano Gakki building in the Ginza district of Tokyo" as "the most expensive location in the Netherlands. " This isn't a translation error. This is an AI rewriting reality. Source: Japanese government official land price announcement (March 17, 2026), translated by Mistral. #GameLocalization #AI #Translation #Japanese #Dutch #Localization #Hallucination #CJK #GameDev

@loekalization

It will now require millions of dollars to move the Gakki building to the Netherlands.

And the commute will be atrocious.