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# North Small Translate

> North Small Translate is a 218B total / 25B active parameter MoE model purpose-built for machine translation across more than 50 languages.

## Description

North Small Translate is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model purpose-built for machine translation.
It has 218 billion total parameters, with 25 billion active parameters, and a 16K context length.

The model provides flexible deployment options for research and enterprise use. Its weights are openly available in
W4A16, FP8, and BF16 under the [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
for non-commercial use.

## What can North Small Translate be used for?

North Small Translate is well-suited for:

* **Knowledge management**: Translate internal documentation, wikis, standard operating procedures, technical
  manuals, historical reports, and institutional knowledge.
* **Safety and operations**: Translate safety manuals, emergency procedures, maintenance instructions,
  manufacturing procedures, incident reports, field-service documentation, and operational alerts.
* **Internal communication**: Translate company announcements, leadership communications, HR policies,
  employee handbooks, benefits information, onboarding materials, newsletters, and intranet content.
* **Localization and customer support**: Translate product content and customer communications while retaining
  control over where the model and data are hosted.

## Supported languages

North Small Translate supports English and more than 50 language and locale variants. Its tier-one languages are
Modern Standard Arabic, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Ukrainian.

#### European languages

* Bulgarian
* Croatian
* Czech
* Danish
* Dutch
* Estonian
* Finnish
* French
* German
* Greek
* Hungarian
* Irish
* Italian
* Latvian
* Lithuanian
* Maltese
* Polish
* Portuguese (Portugal)
* Romanian
* Slovak
* Slovenian
* Spanish
* Swedish

#### All supported languages and locale variants

* Albanian
* Arabic (Egyptian)
* Arabic (Modern Standard)
* Arabic (Saudi)
* Bengali
* Bulgarian
* Catalan
* Chinese (Simplified)
* Chinese (Traditional)
* Croatian
* Czech
* Danish
* Dutch
* English
* Estonian
* Filipino
* Finnish
* French
* German
* Greek
* Hebrew
* Hindi
* Hungarian
* Icelandic
* Indonesian
* Irish
* Italian
* Japanese
* Korean
* Latvian
* Lithuanian
* Malay
* Maltese
* Norwegian Bokmål
* Persian
* Polish
* Portuguese (Portugal)
* Punjabi
* Romanian
* Russian
* Serbian (Cyrillic)
* Slovak
* Slovenian
* Spanish
* Swedish
* Tamil
* Telugu
* Thai
* Turkish
* Ukrainian
* Urdu
* Vietnamese

## Getting started

North Small Translate is available on the free tier through the [Chat V2 API](/reference/chat). Ask the model to
translate the supplied content into a target language:

**`PYTHON`**

```python PYTHON
from cohere import ClientV2

co = ClientV2(api_key="<YOUR_API_KEY>")

target_language = "French"
content = "Enterprises need accurate translations of business-critical documents."

response = co.chat(
    model="north-small-translate-09-2026",
    messages=[
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content": f"Translate everything that follows into {target_language}:\n\n{content}",
        }
    ],
)

print(response.message.content[0].text)
```

## Distribution and technical integration

* **Cohere deployment (free tier - Cohere API)**: Try the model on the free tier through the Chat V2 API.
  Usage is subject to limitations set out in the applicable commercial agreements with customers, including
  Cohere's [Usage Policy](../../docs/usage-policy).
* **Open weights deployment**: Download the
  [NVFP4 W4A16 model from Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/North-Small-Translate-1.0-w4a16) for
  non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
* **Hardware**: Suggested hardware by quantization format:
  * **W4A16**: Two H100s or one B200
  * **FP8**: Four H100s or two B200s
  * **BF16**: Eight H100s or four B200s

## Frequently asked questions

### What is machine translation?

Machine translation uses software to convert text from one language into another. A purpose-built generative model
can act as the translation engine in an application, workflow, or translation platform.

### Why use a machine translation model?

A model gives developers control over integration, prompting, deployment, data residency, and customization.
Self-hosted and private deployments can also support sovereignty requirements and reduce dependence on a fixed
translation platform.

### When is a translation platform a better fit?

A translation platform wraps a model with features such as collaboration, content management, project management,
and formatting. Use a platform when those workflow features are more important than direct control over the model.

## Model Data and Training

* **EU AI Act Article 53(1)(d)**:

  Public Summary of Training Content