The hurd symlink translator lets you create a filesystem node that refers to another node. It is similar to the ln command. Suppose you begin writing a new filesystem for the hurd from scratch. To develop it quickly, you could skip implementing symlinks. The user would instead use the /hurd/symlink translator. The Hurd could provide all sorts of filesystem like functionality that would work regardless of the user's choice of filesystem.

Please note that ext2fs does not use /hurd/symlink. Instead it supports linking directly in the filesystem, since that is faster than using /hurd/symlink.