Cohere releases North Small Translate, an open-weight translation model

Cohere has released North Small Translate, a purpose-built machine-translation model available through Cohere’s API and as FP8 open weights, according to the company’s release note. Cohere’s current model catalog lists north-small-translate-1-0 as live on its Chat endpoint for evaluation.

The release note is dated September 9, 2026. Cohere’s published documentation confirms the current distribution paths but does not establish the exact first moment when API access and model weights became available.

North Small Translate is a sparse mixture-of-experts model. Cohere’s model documentation lists 218 billion total parameters, with 25 billion active, plus a 16,000-token context window and a 16,000-token maximum output. The documentation says the model supports English and more than 50 language and locale variants.

Cohere says the model is free for trial and production API keys until their applicable rate limits are reached. The company also says the FP8 weights are available on Hugging Face for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Commercial production deployment is offered through Model Vault. Cohere’s supported-models page includes North Small Translate but cautions that generative models may require a waitlist.

For private deployment, Cohere’s model documentation suggests one Nvidia B200 GPU or two H100 GPUs. Cohere has separately detailed a megakernel serving engine built for its North Mini Code model, part of the same North family’s work on efficient model serving.

Cohere presents self-hosting and Model Vault as ways for organizations to control model hosting, data residency, and infrastructure, including for sovereignty requirements. That is the company’s deployment positioning, not evidence that North Small Translate is already operating in a specific sovereign deployment. Other vendors have pursued direct partnerships in this area; Mistral AI and Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN announced a sovereign-AI collaboration covering Arabic-language models and infrastructure.

Cohere also promotes North Small Translate’s performance and cost efficiency. Those comparisons remain company claims: this review found no independent reproduction, so the verified availability and deployment paths should not be read as validation of benchmark, throughput, or cost results.