Sarvam-Translate is an advanced translation model built by Sarvam AI in partnership with AI4Bharat, specifically designed for comprehensive, document-level translation across the 22 official Indian languages, built on Gemma3-4B-IT. It addresses modern translation needs by moving beyond isolated sentences to handle long-context inputs, diverse content types, and various formats. Sarvam-Translate aims to provide high-quality, contextually aware translations for Indian languages, which have traditionally lagged behind high-resource languages in LLM performance.

Learn more about Sarvam-Translate in our detailed blog post.

Key Features

Comprehensive Indian Language Support: Focus on the 22 official Indian languages, ensuring nuanced and accurate translations.
Advanced Document-Level Translation: Translates entire documents, web pages, speeches, textbooks, and scientific articles, not just isolated sentences. Maximum context length: 8k tokens
Versatile Format Handling: Processes a wide array of input formats, including markdown, digitized content (handling OCR errors), documents with embedded math and chemistry equations, and code files (translating only comments).
Context-Aware & Inclusive: Engineered to respect different contexts, formats, styles (formal/informal), and ensure inclusivity (e.g., appropriate gender attribution).

Supported languages list

Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, English, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu

Supported directions

The open-sourced checkpoint only supports:

English to Indian languages
Indian languages to English

Note: For Indic to Indic, please pivot via English (that is, translate Indic to English first, then English to Indic)

Quickstart

The following code snippet demonstrates how to use Sarvam-Translate using Transformers.

python

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "sarvamai/sarvam-translate"

# Load tokenizer and model
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name).to('cuda:0')

# Translation task
tgt_lang = "Hindi"
input_txt = "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

# Chat-style message prompt
messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": f"Translate the text below to {tgt_lang}."},
    {"role": "user", "content": input_txt}
]

# Apply chat template to structure the conversation
text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True
)

# Tokenize and move input to model device
model_inputs = tokenizer([text], return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

# Generate the output
generated_ids = model.generate(
    **model_inputs,
    max_new_tokens=1024,
    do_sample=True,
    temperature=0.01,
    num_return_sequences=1
)
output_ids = generated_ids[0][len(model_inputs.input_ids[0]):].tolist()
output_text = tokenizer.decode(output_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)

print("Input:", input_txt)
print("Translation:", output_text)

vLLM Deployment

Server:

vllm serve sarvamai/sarvam-translate --port 8000 --dtype bfloat16 --max-model-len 8192

Client:

python

from openai import OpenAI

# Modify OpenAI's API key and API base to use vLLM's API server.
openai_api_key = "EMPTY"
openai_api_base = "http://localhost:8000/v1"

client = OpenAI(
    api_key=openai_api_key,
    base_url=openai_api_base,
)

models = client.models.list()
model = models.data[0].id


tgt_lang = 'Hindi'
input_txt = 'Be the change you wish to see in the world.'
messages = [{"role": "system", "content": f"Translate the text below to {tgt_lang}."}, {"role": "user", "content": input_txt}]


response = client.chat.completions.create(model=model, messages=messages, temperature=0.01)
output_text = response.choices[0].message.content

print("Input:", input_txt)
print("Translation:", output_text)

With Sarvam APIs

Refer our python client documentation.

Sample code:

python

from sarvamai import SarvamAI
client = SarvamAI()
response = client.text.translate(
    input="Be the change you wish to see in the world.",
    source_language_code="en-IN",
    target_language_code="hi-IN",
    speaker_gender="Male",
    model="sarvam-translate:v1",
)