Yoruba translation and speech-to-text models yo
4 models into Yoruba, 5 from Yoruba, 12 speech-to-text. Best scored into Yoruba: Spanish to Yoruba (chrF++ 15.3). Best scored from Yoruba: Yoruba to English (chrF++ 20.9).
Which open models work for Yoruba?
Windy Translate lists 4 open translation models into Yoruba and 5 from Yoruba. 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 Yoruba is translate-es-yo (chrF++ 15.3, Limited). The best scored from Yoruba is translate-yo-en (chrF++ 20.9, Limited).
With English. English to Yoruba: no direct model here. Yoruba to English: translate-yo-en (chrF++ 20.9, Limited).
By band, the scored Yoruba models are 7 Limited and 2 Not recommended (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 Yoruba 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 Yoruba
| Model | chrF++ (FLORES-200 dev) | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Spanish to Yoruba best scored translate-es-yo | 15.3 Limited | Apache-2.0 |
| Swedish to Yoruba translate-sv-yo | 15.3 Limited | Apache-2.0 |
| French to Yoruba translate-fr-yo | 15.0 Limited | Apache-2.0 |
| Finnish to Yoruba translate-fi-yo | 14.7 Not recommended | Apache-2.0 |
From Yoruba
| Model | chrF++ (FLORES-200 dev) | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Yoruba to English best scored translate-yo-en | 20.9 Limited | Apache-2.0 |
| Yoruba to French translate-yo-fr | 18.4 Limited | Apache-2.0 |
| Yoruba to Spanish translate-yo-es | 17.9 Limited | Apache-2.0 |
| Yoruba to Swedish translate-yo-sv | 17.4 Limited | Apache-2.0 |
| Yoruba to Finnish translate-yo-fi | 14.6 Not recommended | Apache-2.0 |
Scores: chrF++ on FLORES-200 dev, 48 sentences, measured 2026-08-04. Method.