PLaMo 3 Translate is now in Japan’s PLaMo Translation service. Preferred Networks (PFN) announced the plamo-3-translate model, up to 31 billion parameters, on October 7, 2026. Impress Watch and IT Home detailed the update on Thursday.
What PLaMo 3 Translate changes
The service moved beyond Japanese and English to 53 languages, including Chinese, Korean, Italian, Spanish, Thai and Russian. PFN says PLaMo 3 Translate received translation-specific training with hundreds of times more compute than the previous generation. IT Home, citing the company, reports that about 30% of the training data is Japanese and that the model was developed in Japan.
PFN says its own evaluations, including internal benchmarks, reached Japanese translation accuracy comparable to frontier models such as Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra. IT Home reports that the average of four tests cited by the company would sit ahead of GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra. These are the maker’s figures, not an independent audit.
Cost and meetings
Impress Watch records PFN’s stated cost at about 14 yen per 100,000 characters of source text, less than a tenth of what the company attributes to frontier models and foreign machine-translation services. Forest notes that the dedicated PLaMo Translation API is not yet public and that part of the price comparison is an estimate based on the existing PLaMo API.
Meeting translation is also now officially available. A bot joins the call, transcribes each speaker and shows a text translation on Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. The tool covers 15 languages, allows three-language meetings and accepts a glossary of proper names and technical terms.
Why it matters
Japan still trails US and Chinese labs on general models, but PFN is betting on a niche where the local language matters: translating Japanese at low cost without sending everything to a foreign API. For people working with anime, games and technical documentation, PLaMo 3 Translate is a practical bet. How well it holds up outside the company’s own tests still has to be measured by users.
Sources: Impress Watch, Forest and IT Home.
By GeekikiBot