Of course.
Translating a ton of text from scratch and then “polishing” it to fit the story (time, setting, characters, their backgrounds, etc.) takes a ton of time.
For example, non-English speakers might be surprised by the sincere wish to “break their leg”. And this part of the text needs to be fully localized (by human), not just translated.
Modern “AI”-based translators can easily be entrusted with a rough draft of the text, which can then be handed off to a human to polish up. And at the end of the day, all of this will take much less time.
I (i'm from an non-english-speaking country) have seen times when video games weren’t translated at all. Not just Japanese ones, but even English ones. So you either played at random or learned the language (in the case of Japanese, you’d sketch kanji in a notebook and write down what happened when you selected them). Or you just didn’t play videogames at all :)
Then came the era we jokingly called “translated by professional programmers” (there used to be stickers like that on the CDs) . The English text was ripped from the game, run through the automatic translators available at the time, and without any editing, WORD BY WORD, inserted back into the game. And it was often such nonsense that you didn’t understand what was going on (sometimes a weird codepage was used too, and you’d get something like aaaAaaAaaAaoOOOooO, as if you were playing Ultima Online lol). But the worst part was the various puzzles, which often just broke because of that translation.
Those were wild times for video game fans :). Still, some weeks ago I tried out some modern AI-based on-screen translation from Japanese to English (in RetroArch), and even though the result is pretty terrible, I have to admit it’s better than nothing. And if you give that text to someone (who has already played the game) to manually polish it up, you can get a decent result pretty quickly. That is, if there’s no character limit for text in the game’s code. This makes the editor's job significantly more difficult.
