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Meta’s AI translation model embraces overlooked languages

More than 7,000 languages are in use throughout the world, but popular translation tools cannot deal with most of them. A translation model that was tested on under-represented languages takes a key step towards a solution.
  1. David I. Adelani

    1. David I. Adelani is in the Department of Computer Science, University College London Centre for Artificial intelligence, London WC1V 6BH, UK; in the School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and at Mila — Quebec AI Institute, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

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Machine-translation models use artificial intelligence (AI) to translate one human language into another — a worthy feat, given the potential for enhanced communication to break down the barriers posed by differences in language and culture. Yet most of these models can interpret only a small fraction of the world’s languages, in part because training them requires online data that don’t exist for many languages. The US technology company Meta has designed a project called No Language Left Behind (NLLB) to change that. Writing in Nature, the NLLB team1 presents a publicly available model that can translate between 204 languages, many of which are used in low- and middle-income countries.

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Nature 630, 821-822 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00964-2

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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