Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced a major breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence (AI) translation, enabling translation between 200 languages that will support 25 billion translations across the Facebook News Feed, Instagram, and Meta’s other platforms.

Meta’s new “No Language Left Behind” AI model (NLLB-200) is the first to translate across 200 different languages. It features state-of-the-art quality that has been validated through extensive evaluations for each language. This is almost double current standards and will allow billions of more people to have access to translation services for online content.

Meta is now open-sourcing the NLLB-200 model and publishing research tools to enable other researchers to extend this work to more languages and build more inclusive technologies. The company is also providing up to $200,000 of grants to nonprofit organizations for real world applications for NLLB-200.

Some visuals and b-roll can be found HERE.

Highlights
No Language Left Behind (NLLB) - Meta’s effort to develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world’s languages
Universal Speech Translator - Meta is designing novel approaches to translating from speech in one language to another in real time
The challenges that need to be overcome to ensure AI-enabled translation tools truly serve everyone
Stories Told Through Translation, which uses Meta’s AI models to translate books from their languages of origin into hundreds of other languages
The technologies, such as Machine Translation (MT) Systems, that power these translation models

Meta is sharing this state-of-the-art translation breakthrough far beyond their own apps and platforms.

They recently partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, to help improve translation systems on Wikipedia, where there are severe language disparities. For instance, while there are versions of Wikipedia in more than 300 languages, most have far fewer articles than the more than 6 million available in English.