Estonian translation and speech-to-text models et
7 models into Estonian, 8 from Estonian, 12 speech-to-text. Best scored into Estonian: English to Estonian (chrF++ 56.7). Best scored from Estonian: Estonian to English (chrF++ 64.1).
Which open models work for Estonian?
Windy Translate lists 7 open translation models into Estonian and 8 from Estonian. All of them can be downloaded from Hugging Face and run on your own hardware. By licence: 13 Apache-2.0 and 2 CC-BY-4.0 (terms and attribution text: licensing). 15 of them have a screening score on FLORES-200. The best scored into Estonian is translate-tc-big-en-et (chrF++ 56.7, Good). The best scored from Estonian is translate-tc-big-et-en (chrF++ 64.1, Excellent).
With English. English to Estonian: translate-tc-big-en-et (chrF++ 56.7, Good), the best of 2 direct models. Estonian to English: translate-tc-big-et-en (chrF++ 64.1, Excellent), the best of 2 direct models. To translate between Estonian and a language with no direct model, you can go through English with these two.
By band, the scored Estonian models are 1 Excellent, 11 Good and 3 Usable (Excellent is chrF++ 60 or more, Good 45 to 60, Usable 30 to 45, Limited 15 to 30). A score is a 48-sentence screening of news and encyclopedia text, not a measure of accuracy, and a difference of a point or two is noise. How we measured.
Speech-to-text. Whisper's tokenizer lists Estonian as one of its languages, so all 12 multilingual Whisper-based models here can transcribe it: see the speech models. Accuracy differs a lot between languages and model sizes, and this site has not measured speech accuracy.
Each model page has a short snippet to download and run the model yourself, its licence and attribution text, and its score where there is one. Pick the best scored model for your direction, then try it on a few sentences of your own text: a screening score is a starting point, not a guarantee.
Into Estonian
| Model | chrF++ (FLORES-200 dev) | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| English to Estonian best scored translate-tc-big-en-et | 56.7 Good | CC-BY-4.0 |
| English to Estonian translate-en-et | 51.2 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| Swedish to Estonian translate-sv-et | 46.4 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| Finnish to Estonian translate-fi-et | 46.1 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| German to Estonian translate-de-et | 46.0 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| Russian to Estonian translate-ru-et | 43.2 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
| Spanish to Estonian translate-es-et | 43.1 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
From Estonian
| Model | chrF++ (FLORES-200 dev) | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Estonian to English best scored translate-tc-big-et-en | 64.1 Excellent | CC-BY-4.0 |
| Estonian to English translate-et-en | 59.8 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| Estonian to French translate-et-fr | 52.6 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| Estonian to German translate-et-de | 50.7 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| Estonian to Swedish translate-et-sv | 47.3 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| Estonian to Finnish translate-et-fi | 46.5 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| Estonian to Spanish translate-et-es | 46.3 Good | Apache-2.0 |
| Estonian to Russian translate-et-ru | 39.1 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
Scores: chrF++ on FLORES-200 dev, 48 sentences, measured 2026-08-04. Method.