Not so much italics, it's simpler: the title is translated using machine translation, so the word "Nightlife" becomes "la vie Nocturne", but the real French title is "Nuits de folie". The module that adapts the links and the module that does machine translations work separately; one of them inserts the text and the other inserts the link target.

This raises also a Design question: I can easily imagine cases when the machine-translated title is needed, as well as cases such as this, when the real link title is needed, and I cannot think of a clear preference. The frequency is probably different in different languages. Maybe the link cards could somehow gently hint the user that the link text should be edited?

In T145009#2702485, @Amire80 wrote:

This raises also a Design question: I can easily imagine cases when the machine-translated title is needed, as well as cases such as this, when the real link title is needed, and I cannot think of a clear preference. The frequency is probably different in different languages. Maybe the link cards could somehow gently hint the user that the link text should be edited?

We cannot know in advance what will work better for a given link. Machine translation considers the grammar context of the sentence in which the link appears, but can also result into low quality translations in other cases.

Instead of making a one-off solution for the case of links, I think it is better to focus on the more general problem of correcting Machine Translation mistakes. T96165 explores some ideas around this that can be extended to the particular case of links. We can provide a quick way to correct translated text by suggesting (a) previous corrections the user made or (b) the page title if it is a link, as the user tries to edit those. In that way the correction is just one click away avoiding the need to manually edit the text.