Meta's Omnilingual MT for 1,600 Languages

(ai.meta.com)

66 points | by j0e1 3 days ago

7 comments

  • stingraycharles 2 hours ago
    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)

    • pseudocomposer 43 minutes ago
      Kagi Translate is fantastic. Multilingual support is honestly one of the best things about LLMs, imo.
    • djsamseng 54 minutes ago
      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.

    • yellow_lead 24 minutes ago
      It's not even good for Chinese
    • smallerize 2 hours ago
      *they're

      (Sorry I had to)

      • stingraycharles 1 hour ago
        I could have sworn I edited it! I did notice myself as well, but thanks for the correction.
      • tomrod 1 hour ago
        *ពួកគេគឺជា
  • garyclarke27 22 minutes ago
    They can translate 1600 languages, but they cannot do basic text formatting, where are the paragraphs?
  • djoldman 19 minutes ago
    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?

  • bikeshaving 26 minutes ago
    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-...

    • 0x3f 20 minutes ago
      Do you also boycott Toyota for the Hilux?
  • psychoslave 2 hours ago
    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.
    • simultsop 37 minutes ago
      when you market, you use frontier and edge terms, so it sounds pro max
  • croes 1 hour ago
    Off topic, since the AI craze MS‘ documentation translation has ridiculous errors like translating try catch keywords to "versuchen" and "fangen" for German pages
    • Tarq0n 1 hour ago
      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!

  • true21733 3 days ago
    [dead]