Sakana AI Launches Sakana Translate Translator for Japanese, English, and Chinese

Sakana AI on July 5, 2026 integrated a translator Sakana Translate into the Sakana Chat platform. The tool runs on a series of Namazu models and supports bidirectional translation between Japanese, English, and Chinese languages. Simultaneously, three modes of operation were released: Translate, Proofread, and Ask.

What each of the three modes can do

Three modes of Sakana Translate are designed for different stages of working with translation.

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

Translate — basic direct translation mode. Supports all six directions: Japanese ↔ English, Japanese ↔ Chinese, English ↔ Chinese. Suitable for business correspondence, short messages, and documents.

Proofread — proofreading of finished translation. The model finds semantic inaccuracies, literal calques, and stylistic issues that stand out to native speakers. Especially relevant for legal documents, technical specifications, and official correspondence: a single wrong word can change the meaning of a contract clause or create legal ambiguity.

Ask — dialog mode for working with a document. Users ask questions about text content, clarify the meaning of terms, ask for explanation of paragraph context—all in the same window without switching to a separate chat. This mode specifically distinguishes Sakana Translate from ordinary translators and brings the tool closer to an agent assistant for multilingual documents.

All three modes are available within Sakana Chat without additional installation.

What is Namazu and how was quality evaluated

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

Japanese is historically complex for universal language models: three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, kanji), high contextual dependency, branched system of politeness keigo, and agglutinative morphology create technical barriers that specialized models handle significantly better than generalized Western ones. This is a structural advantage of Namazu over global translators.

Translation quality was evaluated on the XCOMET-XL benchmark—the leading automatic machine translation evaluation tool developed by Unbabel. The metric employs cross-lingual pretrained encoders and correlates well with professional translator assessments. Sakana AI has not yet published specific numbers on the benchmark.

Why specifically these three languages

Japanese, English, and Chinese are the standard trio for business communications in East Asia. Companies working with partners from Japan and China simultaneously regularly need three-way translation: bilingual tools do not cover this scenario. Sakana Translate combines all three languages and three working modes in a single Sakana Chat window, making it especially convenient for international teams in the region.

What does this mean

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