North Small Translate: Advanced Cost-Effective Translation (Cohere CAT+)

Tom Kocmi, Alexandre Berard, Phil Blunsom, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shaun Cassini, Ona De Gibert, Aidan Gomez, Nithya Govindarajan, Shun Kiyono, Olivia Lasche, Lawrence Rogers, Kelly Marchisio, Nikita Moghe, Yash More, Camila Moran-Hidalgo, Yiyang Nan, Michael Sachs, Trisha Starostina, Daan Van Stigt, Spencer Rarrick, Sebastian Vincent, Ivan Zhang, Nicholas Frosst


Abstract
We present North Small Translate, an open-weight, LLM-based machine translation (MT) model with instruction-following capabilities built on the same foundation as Cohere’s Command A Plus, a mixture-of-experts architecture with 25 billion active parameters out of 218 billion total parameters. North Small Translate is trained using difficulty sampling to obtain challenging documents and a five-step training protocol combining supervised fine-tuning, direct preference optimization, and online reinforcement learning. We prioritized throughput through a non-reasoning base model and supplemented with optional agentic capabilities to unlock translation quality gains. North Small Translate is trained to perform MT-related tasks, including post-editing and quality estimation, as well as related tasks such as general instruction following. The model achieves top MT performance across 50 languages in the class of models under 1T parameters, with no need to run expensive reasoning at inference time.
Anthology ID:
2026.wmt-main.70
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz
Venues:
WMT | WS
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1305–1317
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.70/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tom Kocmi, Alexandre Berard, Phil Blunsom, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shaun Cassini, Ona De Gibert, Aidan Gomez, Nithya Govindarajan, Shun Kiyono, Olivia Lasche, Lawrence Rogers, Kelly Marchisio, Nikita Moghe, Yash More, Camila Moran-Hidalgo, Yiyang Nan, Michael Sachs, Trisha Starostina, Daan Van Stigt, Spencer Rarrick, Sebastian Vincent, Ivan Zhang, and Nicholas Frosst. 2026. North Small Translate: Advanced Cost-Effective Translation (Cohere CAT+). In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation, pages 1305–1317, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
North Small Translate: Advanced Cost-Effective Translation (Cohere CAT+) (Kocmi et al., WMT 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.70.pdf