The first AI model that translates 100 languages without relying on English data

Facebook AI is introducing, M2M-100 the first multilingual machine translation (MMT) model that translates between any pair of 100 languages without relying on English data. When translating, say, Chinese to French, previous best multilingual models train on Chinese to English and English to French, because English training data is the most widely available. Our model directly trains on Chinese to French data to better preserve meaning. It outperforms English-centric systems by 10 points on the widely used BLEU metric for evaluating machine translations. M2M-100 is trained on a total of 2,200 language directions -- or 10x more than previous best, English-centric multilingual models.