Cohere Releases North Small Translate, a 218B MoE Open-Weight Translation Model Under CC BY-NC

Cohere published North Small Translate on September 10, 2026, as the first translation model in its North family. Weights are on Hugging Face under CohereLabs/North-Small-Translate-1.0 (plus FP8 and NVFP4 W4A16 variants) for research and non-commercial use under CC BY-NC 4.0, with Cohere Labs’ Acceptable Use Policy still applying. Commercial deployment is directed to Cohere sales and to RWS Language Weaver, Cohere’s stated development partner.

The model is a decoder-only sparse mixture-of-experts transformer: about 218 billion total parameters with roughly 25 billion active per token, 128 experts with eight activated plus shared experts, and a 16K-token input and 16K-token output window. The Hugging Face card lists support for 50 languages and an attention stack that interleaves sliding-window layers (window 4096, RoPE) with global layers at a 3:1 ratio, following the pattern Cohere attributes to Command A.

Scores and serving

Cohere’s launch blog reports a vendor WMT26 all-languages score of 83.60 for the standard model and 84.36 for an agentic multi-pass workflow that finds and fixes translation errors. The same post places those figures ahead of listed proprietary and open-weight baselines (including DeepL NextGen, Google Translate, Gemma 4 31B, Qwen 3.5 397B A17B, and GLM 5.2) under an evaluation that uses GPT-5.6-Sol as a judge. Those numbers are vendor-reported; independent leaderboard confirmation should be treated as separate.

Hardware guidance on the card and blog snapshot ranges from multi-GPU BF16 footprints (examples include 4×B200 or 8×H100) down to tighter FP8 and W4A16 recipes (including 1×B200 or 2×H100 for W4A16). Cohere documents Transformers loading tips, a Hugging Face Space demo, and vLLM serving with the cohere_melody parsers for structural markers in the reply format.

Primary sources for this brief are Cohere’s September 10 North Small Translate blog post and the Hugging Face model card for CohereLabs/North-Small-Translate-1.0.