aoiandroid/africa-v1-translation-model

Africa v1 Translation Model

This is a fine-tuned translation model for 29 African languages, based on Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507.

Model Description

Africa v1 is a multilingual translation model trained to translate between English and 29 African languages. The model uses LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) fine-tuning and is available in multiple formats:

• GGUF (Q4_K_M quantized, 2.3 GB)
• MLX 4-bit (2.1 GB)
• LoRA adapters for custom deployment

Supported Languages (29)

African Languages:

• Afrikaans (af), Akan (ak), Amharic (am), Bambara (bm), Ewe (ee)
• Fula (ff), Hausa (ha), Igbo (ig), Kinyarwanda (rw), Kirundi (rn)
• Kongo (kg), Lingala (ln), Luganda (lg), Ndebele (nd), Northern Sotho (nso)
• Chichewa/Nyanja (ny), Oromo (om), Shona (sn), Somali (so), Swahili (sw)
• Tigrinya (ti), Tsonga (ts), Tswana (tn), Twi (tw), Venda (ve)
• Wolof (wo), Xhosa (xh), Yoruba (yo), Zulu (zu)

Plus English (en) for bidirectional translation.

Training Details

Base Model

• Model: Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507
• Parameters: 4 billion
• Architecture: Transformer-based language model

Fine-tuning

• Method: LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)
• LoRA Rank: 8
• LoRA Alpha: 20
• Target Layers: 16 layers
• Training Iterations: 10,000
• Learning Rate: 5e-5
• Batch Size: 1

Training Data

• Total Translation Pairs: 281,993
• Total Training Examples: 563,986 (bidirectional)
• Train Split: 507,587
• Validation Split: 28,199
• Test Split: 28,200

Evaluation Results

Evaluated on 30 test samples:

Metric	Score	Interpretation
Non-empty outputs	30/30 (100%)	All samples generate output
BLEU	0.71	Very low - experimental model
chrF	9.24	Low character-level overlap
TER	362.19	High edit distance

Note: This is an experimental v1 model. Translation quality is limited due to:

• Training data format (lacks system prompts)
• Low-resource language challenges
• Repetition issues in some outputs

See v2 model for improved version with system prompts.

Usage

GGUF with llama.cpp

# Download the GGUF model
huggingface-cli download aoiandroid/africa-v1-translation-model africa-v1-q4_k_m.gguf

# Run inference
./llama.cpp/main -m africa-v1-q4_k_m.gguf \
  -p "Translate from English to Swahili:\n\nHello, how are you?" \
  --temp 0.1 \
  -n 256

MLX with mlx-lm

# Install MLX
pip install mlx-lm

# Download model
huggingface-cli download aoiandroid/africa-v1-translation-model --local-dir africa-v1-mlx --include "mlx-4bit/*"

# Run inference
python -m mlx_lm.generate \
  --model africa-v1-mlx/mlx-4bit \
  --prompt "Translate from English to Swahili:\n\nHello, how are you?" \
  --max-tokens 256 \
  --temp 0.1

LoRA Adapters

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
from peft import PeftModel

# Load base model
base_model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507")

# Load LoRA adapters
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base_model, "aoiandroid/africa-v1-translation-model", subfolder="lora")

# Run inference
prompt = "Translate from English to Swahili:\n\nHello, how are you?"
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256, temperature=0.1)
translation = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
print(translation)

Limitations and Biases

• Experimental Model: This is v1 with known quality issues
• Repetition: Model may get stuck in repetition loops
• Hallucination: May generate fluent but incorrect translations
• Low-Resource Languages: Limited training data for some African languages
• English-Centric: Best performance on English↔African pairs

Intended Use

• Research: Exploring multilingual translation for African languages
• Experimentation: Testing low-resource language translation
• Educational: Understanding LoRA fine-tuning approaches

Not recommended for production use. Use v2 or specialized translation models for production.

Citation

@software{africa_v1_translation_model,
  title = {Africa v1 Translation Model},
  author = {TranslateBlue Project},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/aoiandroid/africa-v1-translation-model}
}

License

Apache 2.0

Model Card Authors

TranslateBlue Project

Model Card Contact

For questions or issues, please open an issue in the model repository.