Chichewa translation models ny
6 models into Chichewa, 3 from Chichewa. Best scored into Chichewa: English to Chichewa (chrF++ 41.1). Best scored from Chichewa: Chichewa to English (chrF++ 39.6).
Which open models work for Chichewa?
Windy Translate lists 6 open translation models into Chichewa and 3 from Chichewa. All of them can be downloaded from Hugging Face and run on your own hardware. By licence: 9 Apache-2.0 (terms and attribution text: licensing). 9 of them have a screening score on FLORES-200. The best scored into Chichewa is translate-en-ny (chrF++ 41.1, Usable). The best scored from Chichewa is translate-ny-en (chrF++ 39.6, Usable).
With English. English to Chichewa: translate-en-ny (chrF++ 41.1, Usable). Chichewa to English: translate-ny-en (chrF++ 39.6, Usable). To translate between Chichewa and a language with no direct model, you can go through English with these two.
By band, the scored Chichewa models are 8 Usable and 1 Limited (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. No speech model here covers Chichewa: there is no dedicated model, and Whisper's tokenizer does not list the language.
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 Chichewa
| Model | chrF++ (FLORES-200 dev) | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| English to Chichewa best scored translate-en-ny | 41.1 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
| French to Chichewa translate-fr-ny | 32.5 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
| Finnish to Chichewa translate-fi-ny | 32.5 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
| German to Chichewa translate-de-ny | 32.2 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
| Spanish to Chichewa translate-es-ny | 31.6 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
| Swedish to Chichewa translate-sv-ny | 30.5 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
From Chichewa
| Model | chrF++ (FLORES-200 dev) | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Chichewa to English best scored translate-ny-en | 39.6 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
| Chichewa to Spanish translate-ny-es | 31.9 Usable | Apache-2.0 |
| Chichewa to German translate-ny-de | 29.3 Limited | Apache-2.0 |
Scores: chrF++ on FLORES-200 dev, 48 sentences, measured 2026-08-04. Method.