Sakana AI launches Sakana Translate for Japanese, English and Chinese

On July 5, 2026, Sakana AI integrated the Sakana Translate translator into its Sakana Chat platform. The tool runs on the Namazu model series and supports two-way translation between Japanese, English and Chinese. Three working modes launched at the same time: Translate, Proofread and Ask.

What each of the three modes does

The three Sakana Translate modes are designed for different stages of translation work.

• Launch date: July 5, 2026, built into Sakana Chat
• Supported languages: Japanese, English, Chinese
• Translation directions: 6 (every pair in both directions)
• Model series: Namazu
• Quality benchmark: XCOMET-XL

Translate is the basic direct-translation mode. It supports all six directions: Japanese ↔ English, Japanese ↔ Chinese, English ↔ Chinese. It suits business correspondence, short messages and documents.

Proofread reviews an existing translation. The model finds semantic inaccuracies, literal calques and stylistic problems that jar native speakers. It is especially relevant for legal documents, technical specifications and official correspondence, where a single wrong word can change the meaning of a contract clause or create legal uncertainty.

Ask is a conversational mode for working with a document. The user asks questions about the content of the text, clarifies the meaning of terms and asks for the context of a paragraph to be explained, all in the same window, without switching to a separate chat. This mode sets Sakana Translate apart from ordinary translators and brings the tool closer to an agent-style assistant for multilingual documents.

All three modes are available inside Sakana Chat with no additional installation.

What Namazu is and how quality was evaluated

Namazu (なまず, "catfish" in Japanese) is a series of Sakana AI language models developed with a priority on Japanese. The name continues the company's fish theme (sakana means "fish"). Sakana AI is based in Tokyo and focuses on AI systems for the Japanese and Asian markets.

Japanese has historically been hard for general-purpose language models: three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, kanji), heavy dependence on context, the elaborate keigo politeness system and agglutinative morphology create technical barriers that specialized models handle noticeably better than generalist Western ones. This is a structural advantage of Namazu over global translators.

Translation quality was evaluated on the XCOMET-XL benchmark, a leading automatic metric for machine translation developed by Unbabel. The metric uses cross-lingual pretrained encoders and correlates well with the judgments of professional translators. Sakana AI has not yet published specific benchmark figures.

Why these three languages

Japanese, English and Chinese are the standard trio of business communication in East Asia. Companies that work with partners in Japan and China at the same time regularly need three-way translation, a scenario that bilingual tools do not cover. Sakana Translate combines all three languages and three working modes in a single Sakana Chat window, which makes it especially convenient for international teams in the region.

What this means

The launch of Sakana Translate expands Sakana Chat from a basic chat interface into a professional platform for working with multilingual documents. The Ask mode is the first public sign of Sakana AI's agent ambitions in translation: the tool is learning not just to translate text but to help users understand its content.