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Meta's Omnilingual MT for 1,600 Languages
- true21733 7mo ago[dead]
- stingraycharles 7mo agoI find that meta’s translations are very poor compared to others, at least for relatively obscure languages, which I figured was relevant considering the article. Google Translate is a good default, but LLMs are really good at translations, as they’re better capable at understanding context and providing culturally appropriate translations. (I live in Cambodia where they speak Khmer)
- smallerize 7mo ago*they're (Sorry I had to)
- stingraycharles 7mo agoI could have sworn I edited it! I did notice myself as well, but thanks for the correction.
- tomrod 7mo ago*ពួកគេគឺជា
- djsamseng 7mo agoHello from Siem Reap, Cambodia! Awesome to see a fellow tech enthusiast from Cambodia. I actually found Facebook’s translations pretty good (better than Google Translate for things longer than a sentence). From my understanding of Khmer, Khmer is a bit more verbose and context dependent, hence LLMs in Khmer would be a big help understand those nuances. In the inverse case (LLMs generating khmer from English) I heard from locals that it sounds formal and “robotic” which I found quite interesting.
- pseudocomposer 7mo agoKagi Translate is fantastic. Multilingual support is honestly one of the best things about LLMs, imo.
- yellow_lead 7mo agoIt's not even good for Chinese
- ks2048 7mo agoSo, LLMs are noticeably better in Khmer than Google Translate? I wonder why Google Translate doesn't use Gemini under-the-hood. Perhaps it's more prone to hallucinations. I'm interested in find some thorough testing of translations on different LLMs vs Translation APIs.
- pattilupone 7mo agoThere's a dropdown on Google Translate that lets you choose "Advanced" mode or "Classic" mode. Advanced mode uses Gemini but it's only available for select languages.
- psychoslave 7mo agoThat's a high count, but still a bit away from "Omni". Usual count is between 4k and 8k depending the source. But the first 1k might be the hardest, certainly.
- simultsop 7mo agowhen you market, you use frontier and edge terms, so it sounds pro max
- cointegrated 7mo ago1.6k languages is for how many we were able to find more or less reliable evaluation data (mostly thanks to Bible translators and all those who contributed to BOUQuET). Out of the remaining several thousand languages, we expect the OMT models to support understanding (but not generation) for a significant proportion, due to cross-lingual generalisation between similar languages. So it’s not truly “omni” in the sense of supporting every single language on Earth, but it’s our best effort to do so, and probably the most “omni” models existing today.
- psychoslave 7mo agoSo, hyperchilio-lingual would be more accurate, and myriad-lingual would be even behind all documented existing human language. But I guess marketing team is not that found of precision in philological considerations.
- coder68 7mo agoIs there interest in benchmarking the proprietary LLMs for translation? Curious as I often use Gemini 3 Flash, but I have no idea how good it is for my language family. I prefer open models (in fact the smaller the better for offline), but it'd be useful to know how well the Big Three do.
- cointegrated 6mo agoWe did some benchmarking of them internally, but not sure if we'll publish the detailed results. Just in case, keep an eye on https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/bouquet https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/bouquet: if we release the evaluation results, they will be there.
- croes 7mo agoOff topic, since the AI craze MS‘ documentation translation has ridiculous errors like translating try catch keywords to "versuchen" and "fangen" for German pages
- Tarq0n 7mo agoYes their translations offer negative value, which is annoying because at work you can't usually choose your locale settings. And the errors are really basic, like translating shortly to short, not the same thing at all!
- bikeshaving 7mo agoI’m very wary of celebrating Meta’s language work when the company was credibly found to have contributed to the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar, and separately, to human rights abuses against Tigrayans during the conflict in northern Ethiopia. Be careful whose sins you’re laundering. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/02/meta-new-policy-changes/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/02/meta-new-poli... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/meta-failure-contributed-to-abuses-against-tigray-ethiopia/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/meta-failure-...
- 0x3f 7mo agoDo you also boycott Toyota for the Hilux?
- bikeshaving 7mo agoI don’t own a car :)
- asveikau 7mo agoI had the same reaction to this post. Mainly because one of Meta's explanations for the lapse was that they didn't have moderators who understood the local language You hear that folks? Lack of localization kills.
- garyclarke27 7mo agoThey can translate 1600 languages, but they cannot do basic text formatting, where are the paragraphs?
- djoldman 7mo agoJust spent a long time trying to find where you can download any of these weights. Is it open weight? If so, why isn't there just a straight link to the models?
- ks2048 7mo agoI haven't seen anywhere claiming they are open weight (although their last similar model, NLLB was). They say their leaderboard and evaluation datasets are freely available. Closest statement I've seen in the paper, "Our translation models are built on top of freely available models."
- cointegrated 7mo agoIt is not open weight as of today (unfortunately, for the reasons out of control of us the authors, we weren’t able to release the weights). All we could release is part of the evaluation data. I hope this will change in a while.
- rowanseerwald 7mo ago[dead]
- ath3nd 7mo ago[dead]
- ks2048 7mo agoI'll be looking at this in detail. I've started a company to do similar things, https://6k.ai https://6k.ai I'm currently concentrating on better data gathering for low-resource languages. When you look in detail at data like Common Crawl, finepdfs, and fineweb, (1) they are really lacking quality data sources if you know where to look, and (2) the sources they have are not processed "finely" enough (e.g. finepdfs classify each page of PDF as having a specific language, where-as many language learning sources have language pairs, etc.
- ccgreg 7mo agoCommon Crawl has been running a low-resource language project for 1.5 years now -- it's a hard problem.
- intended 7mo agoThere’s many nation states working on this, have you looked into availability of those data sets? What languages are you prioritizing?
- ks2048 7mo agoYes, there are government datasets, languge "acadamies" (or "regulators") - organizations focused on preserving / teaching the language, and often smaller, local publishers that publish material in their local language. I'm living in Guatemala, so have been focusing on the Mayan languages here (22 languages, millions of speakers).
- dhosek 7mo agoAs an aside, I remember visiting Guatemala (in the border area near Chiapas) in the early 90s and discovering that “Mayan” was not the monolith that I had been led to believe by my culturally narrow American education, but was a diverse collection of related cultures with multiple languages. In one of the villages we visited, there was a language school where foreigners were learning Jacalteco. One student was from Israel and where most of the students had vocabulary lists in three columns (Jacalteco - Spanish - English), his had four columns where he did one more step of translation to Hebrew.
- ks2048 7mo agoMeta released No Language Left Behind (NLLB) [1], I think in 2022. I wonder why this in not "NLLB 2.0"? These companies love introducing new names to confuse things [1] https://ai.meta.com/research/no-language-left-behind/ https://ai.meta.com/research/no-language-left-behind/
- cointegrated 7mo agoThis project is absolutely NLLB 2.0 in spirit. However, we decided to reserve the name “OMT-NLLB” only to the subset of the new models that have encoder-decoder architecture similar to the original NLLB-200. The other models are called “OMT-LLaMA” and have classical LLM architecture. The idea here (and we had to emphasize it to justify the project internally) is that we are developing not just new models but a recipe for massive multilinguality that can be integrated into general-purpose LLMs.
- ks2048 7mo agoAnother interesting thing mentioned here is: BOUQuET: Benchmark and Open-initiative for Universal Quality Evaluation in Translation. https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/bouquet https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/bouquet
- intended 7mo agoDidn’t research show that models get worse at translation the more languages get added in? The curse of multilinguality? Lauscher 2020? It looks like meta found a way forward. Reading meta’s abstract, it seems that they have found ways to improve the quality of the training data, and also new evaluation tools? They are also saying that OMT-LLaMA does a better job at text generation than other baseline models.
- gojomo 7mo agoCan translate between 1600 languages. Can't achieve subject-verb agreement in 1st sentence of their English abstract. Advances made through No Language Left Behind (NLLB) have demonstrated that high-quality machine translation (MT) scale to 200 languages.
- vgivanovic 7mo agoHuh? I'm a native English speaker and the sentence looks OK. Advances have demonstrated... The NLLB part is an adjectival(sic) phrase that modifies the noun "Advances". Hopefully I'm not wrong...
- sajforbes 7mo agoIt was a needlessly snarky way to word it, but they are right. The issue is the verb 'scale/s' rather than 'advance/s'
- pxtail 7mo agoWhere are real, useful features, why in 2026 can't I get transcript of voice messages in my chat?
- mandeepj 7mo agoWhatsApp has that feature!
- tempaccountabgd 7mo ago[dead]
- asveikau 7mo agoThey've come a long way since enabling Burmese genocide citing lack of available translations.
- lzhgusapp 7mo ago[dead]
- mrlonglong 7mo agoIt can't even do decent Welsh to English translations.