@FinchHaven
MOST LIKELY both DeepL and LibreTranslate implemented in Mastodon in the same way differing only in the "protocol" they use when communicating with translation service.

> it seem like a bizarre design decision

Not really. In most cases translation is not needed. So why would the origin node store unnecessary data? Even if it's "lazy" translation, it's not very useful to keep it there because most likely it won't be needed anymore. Also servers are often "regional". So most of the users speak the same language.
Furthermore server-to-server requests are not cheap, so adding another link to the chain (server1 -> server2 -> translation service) would not be optimal.

> from Russian and Japanese

Even stranger then.