Tether AI Research Open-Sources Offline Translation Models Covering 19 African Languages
Tether AI Research has released three open-source machine translation models: QVAC TranslatePsy-AfriSLM, QVAC TranslatePsy-AfriNano, and QVAC TranslatePsy-EuroNano. They cover 19 African languages, 8 African languages, and 9 European languages, respectively, and can run locally on phones and laptops. No internet connection is required, so user data stays on the device. The 800-million-parameter AfriSLM beat Qwen3.5-122B-A10B, TranslateGemma-27B, and NLLB-3.3B on the FLORES-200, BOUQuET, and SMOL benchmarks. EuroNano handles 90 translation directions between 9 European languages. Its smallest deployment requires only 36MB of storage, roughly 94 percent less than Firefox's comparable offline translation configuration. AfriSLM is now available on Hugging Face, and the related paper has been accepted at EMNLP 2026.

