Sakana AI Launches Sakana Translate, a Namazu-Powered Japanese–English–Chinese Translation Tool With Translate, Proofread, and Ask Modes

AI Launches Sakana Translate, a Namazu-Powered Japanese–English–Chinese Translation Tool With Translate, Proofread, and Ask Modes">

Sakana AI has added a new feature called Sakana Translate to its chat service, Sakana Chat . It handles bidirectional translation across Japanese, English, and Chinese. The translation engine is Namazu , the company’s model series adapted for Japanese.

Sakana Translate ships as a free web app. A single account unlocks all three of its modes.

Sakana Translate is a browser-based translation product, not a new base model. It runs on Namazu, Sakana AI’s Japan-adapted model series.

The concept Sakana AI states is ‘deep translation for Japan.’ The goal goes beyond swapping words and sentence structures. It aims to carry context, tone, and register between languages.

That focus targets a specific gap. Sakana AI argues that general tools often miss what makes Japanese distinctive. Examples include business honorifics, culturally specific concepts, abbreviations, and internet slang. Grammar may stay correct while interpersonal tone gets lost.

The product bundles three functions into one screen : Translate, Proofread, and Ask.

Each mode targets a different everyday task. The table below summarizes them.

A few terms are worth unpacking for engineers new to this space.

You can try all three modes in the interactive demo below

Namazu is the engine, so its design matters here. Sakana AI is a Tokyo lab founded in 2023 by David Ha and Llion Jones.

Namazu is not trained from scratch. It applies post-training to existing open-weight foundation models. Reported base models include DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus, Llama 3.1 405B, and gpt-oss-120B.

Post-training means adapting an already-trained model with further tuning. It is cheaper and faster than pre-training a model from zero. Sakana AI uses it to fit models to Japanese language and culture.

Sakana AI first announced the Namazu series on March 24, 2026 . Sakana Translate applies that same adaptation work to the translation problem.

Sakana AI team evaluated translation quality with a standard setup. It used XCOMET-XL on the WMT 2024 General Translation task data.

By the reported results, Sakana Translate landed in a score band close behind the leading models. Sakana AI describes this as competitive quality for a translation engine.