alt.hn

3/18/2026 at 5:00:18 AM

Meta's Omnilingual MT for 1,600 Languages

 https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/omnilingual-mt-machine-translation-for-1600-languages/?_fb_noscript=1

by j0e1

3/21/2026 at 1:42:10 PM

I 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)

by stingraycharles

3/21/2026 at 3:07:24 PM

Hello 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.

by djsamseng

3/21/2026 at 3:18:13 PM

Kagi Translate is fantastic. Multilingual support is honestly one of the best things about LLMs, imo.

by pseudocomposer

3/21/2026 at 5:05:07 PM

So, 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.

by ks2048

3/21/2026 at 5:10:40 PM

There'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.

by pattilupone

3/21/2026 at 3:37:01 PM

It's not even good for Chinese

by yellow_lead

3/21/2026 at 1:56:51 PM

*they're

(Sorry I had to)

by smallerize

3/21/2026 at 2:05:38 PM

I could have sworn I edited it! I did notice myself as well, but thanks for the correction.

by stingraycharles

3/21/2026 at 2:29:58 PM

*ពួកគេគឺជា

by tomrod

3/21/2026 at 9:34:11 PM

Can 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.

by gojomo

3/21/2026 at 5:10:59 PM

I'll be looking at this in detail. I've started a company to do similar things, 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.

by ks2048

3/21/2026 at 10:36:31 PM

Hey, this is super cool! I’ve been working on a similar problem, focusing on low-resource and underserved languages including the Mayan family, and have published some research and open resources around that [0, 1].

On the data side, I’ve found that the biggest bottleneck isn’t collecting text (it’s out there!) but reliable language identification. It’s often difficult or ambiguous to separate languages cleanly in datasets like Common Crawl, Fineweb, or others. I worked on improving this a bit for Fineweb 2 for my native language, that might inspire you [3].

Many of the challenges you mention seem to recur across regions and language families, so I’d love to connect and compare notes sometime. Feel free to reach me at omar [at] the labs site below.

0: https://wikilangs.org

1: https://omneitylabs.com

2: https://huggingface.co/blog/omarkamali/gherbal-multilingual-...

by omneity

3/22/2026 at 4:30:42 AM

You both might find it useful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950661

I’ve also recently started in this space: building an agent, for a client, who can communicate in multiple languages.

by mandeepj

3/21/2026 at 8:21:13 PM

Common Crawl has been running a low-resource language project for 1.5 years now -- it's a hard problem.

by ccgreg

3/22/2026 at 5:53:41 AM

It's sad that I didn't see any languages on your website from Australia, where there are hundreds of languages that need translating.

by quantumwoke

3/21/2026 at 5:28:39 PM

There’s many nation states working on this, have you looked into availability of those data sets?

What languages are you prioritizing?

by intended

3/21/2026 at 5:41:29 PM

Yes, 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).

by ks2048

3/21/2026 at 5:59:28 PM

As 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.

by dhosek

3/21/2026 at 3:42:41 PM

Just 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?

by djoldman

3/22/2026 at 12:10:21 PM

It 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.

by cointegrated

3/21/2026 at 5:29:42 PM

I 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."

by ks2048

3/21/2026 at 3:39:12 PM

They can translate 1600 languages, but they cannot do basic text formatting, where are the paragraphs?

by garyclarke27

3/21/2026 at 5:33:36 PM

It's an abstract for a paper, so it's officially supposed to be one paragraph.

by canjobear

3/21/2026 at 6:35:10 PM

In the paper itself, the abstract actually does have a paragraph break, so it's probably just an autoformatting issue or something.

by BalinKing

3/22/2026 at 12:15:48 AM

Where are real, useful features, why in 2026 can't I get transcript of voice messages in my chat?

by pxtail

3/22/2026 at 4:19:35 AM

WhatsApp has that feature!

by mandeepj

3/21/2026 at 1:44:53 PM

That'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.

by psychoslave

3/22/2026 at 12:03:10 PM

1.6k 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.

by cointegrated

3/22/2026 at 12:24:18 PM

So, 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.

by psychoslave

3/21/2026 at 3:24:36 PM

when you market, you use frontier and edge terms, so it sounds pro max

by simultsop

3/21/2026 at 5:45:25 PM

Didn’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.

by intended

3/22/2026 at 5:22:56 AM

They've come a long way since enabling Burmese genocide citing lack of available translations.

by asveikau

3/21/2026 at 2:07:14 PM

Off topic, since the AI craze MS‘ documentation translation has ridiculous errors like translating try catch keywords to "versuchen" and "fangen" for German pages

by croes

3/21/2026 at 2:27:44 PM

Yes 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!

by Tarq0n

3/22/2026 at 7:10:12 AM

[dead]

by lzhgusapp

3/21/2026 at 4:06:24 PM

[dead]

by rowanseerwald

3/22/2026 at 3:35:55 AM

[dead]

by tempaccountabgd

3/21/2026 at 4:57:10 PM

[dead]

by ath3nd

3/18/2026 at 7:37:04 AM

[dead]

by true21733

3/21/2026 at 3:35:27 PM

I’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-poli... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/meta-failure-...

by bikeshaving

3/22/2026 at 5:44:17 AM

I 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.

by asveikau

3/21/2026 at 3:41:24 PM

Do you also boycott Toyota for the Hilux?

by 0x3f

3/21/2026 at 3:41:58 PM

I don’t own a car :)

by bikeshaving

3/21/2026 at 5:15:21 PM

Meta 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/

by ks2048

3/22/2026 at 12:23:43 PM

This 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.

by cointegrated