Tether open-sources offline translation models covering 19 African languages
Tether released open-source translation models that run offline, notable for African language coverage, but all benchmark results are vendor-reported pending independent verification.
Original event 2026-09-02
Tether AI Research released open-source translation models on September 2 — QVAC TranslatePsy-AfriSLM and EuroNano — that run fully offline on phones and laptops, keeping data on the device.
AfriSLM covers 19 African languages including Hausa, Amharic, Yoruba and Swahili, which Tether says reach roughly half of Africa's population; EuroNano uses English as a pivot for 9 European languages across 90 translation directions, with the smallest deployment at just 36MB. Models are downloadable on Hugging Face in 0.8B, 2B and 4B sizes.
All performance figures are Tether's own: the 0.8B version reportedly beats Qwen3.5-122B-A10B and other larger models on FLORES-200, BOUQuET and SMOL, attributed to filtering out about 96% of low-quality training data. These comparisons are not independently reproduced; the underlying research has been accepted at EMNLP 2026, a future verification point.