Preferred Networks releases open-weight PLaMo 3 Translate models from 0.8B to 31B for offline translation
The Tokyo company says even the 0.8B model beats TranslateGemma and Tencent's Hy-MT2 in its own tests across 53 languages; no independent evaluation has been published.
Why it matters
Preferred Networks is one of Japan's main developers of home-grown foundation models, and PLaMo Translate had until now been offered as a service. The weights are free for individuals and companies with annual revenue of 1 billion yen or less, for commercial and non-commercial use, so small firms can run translation on phones, laptops or internal servers without sending text to the cloud. PFN points to tourism, enterprise and disaster response as uses. Watch for independent benchmarks against Google's and Tencent's open translation models and for the licence terms larger companies are offered.
Key facts
- Four sizes: 0.8B, 2B, 8B and 31B parameters
- Translates across 53 languages
- Free for users with annual revenue of 1 billion yen or less
- Weights on PFN's Hugging Face page
- Released 5 November 2026