Model chooser  /  Translate and localise  /  One-off

To translate one important piece, use Claude Opus 5.

For a website, a launch post or a contract summary in another language, tone matters as much as accuracy. Claude models are consistently noted for style in translation reviews, and Opus 5 follows a glossary and a voice brief at the same time.

How to use it ↓ Try another task

Why Claude Opus 5

The reasons it wins for this job.

  • Translation reviews consistently note Claude for style and tone. No public benchmark ranks the September 2026 generation on translation yet, so this pick rests on that track record and on instruction following.
  • All current Claude models are documented as multilingual, and Opus 5 is the strongest you can use in the app without a wait.
  • It follows a glossary, a banned-terms list and a register (formal or informal) together, which is what separates a usable translation from a literal one.
  • Its 1M-token context means a whole site's copy can be translated in one pass, so terms stay consistent from page to page.

How to use it

4 steps to a first result.

  1. 1Write a glossaryProduct names, terms that must not be translated, and preferred translations for key phrases.
  2. 2Say who reads itCountry, formality and audience. Brazilian and European Portuguese are not interchangeable.
  3. 3Translate, then back-translate a sampleAsk a second chat to translate a few paragraphs back. Meaning drift shows up fast.
  4. 4Have a native speaker read itFor anything public, one read by a native speaker catches what no model will.

Prompt for Claude

Start from this.

Edit the parts in capitals, then run it.

Translate the text below from SOURCE LANGUAGE into TARGET LANGUAGE for READERS IN COUNTRY.

Register: formal or informal.
Keep in English: PRODUCT NAMES, TERMS.
Glossary:
- SOURCE TERM = TARGET TERM

Translate meaning and tone, not word by word. Keep formatting, links and placeholders like {name} exactly as they are. After the translation, list any phrases where you had to choose between two meanings, and what you chose.

TEXT:
PASTE HERE
Nothing is sent anywhere. It copies to your clipboard.

Alternatives that also work

If Claude Opus 5 is not an option.

Gemini 3.8 FlashOfficial page →

Google · closed · cost: low

Pick it when the language is lower-resource. Gemini 2.5 Pro topped WMT 2025, and Google has a long record in machine translation.

GPT-6 AstraOfficial page →

OpenAI · closed · cost: high

Pick it when you work in ChatGPT and the source includes images or scanned documents.

Tencent Hy-MT2 30B A3BHugging Face →

Tencent · open weights · cost: free weights; you pay for the hardware · 24K HF downloads/mo

Pick it when you want a dedicated translation model on your own hardware. Tencent built it for 33 languages with terminology control.

Watch out for

Doing this again and again? To localise at volume, translate with Gemini 3.8 Flash. Product strings, help articles and support replies in ten languages add up to millions of tokens a month. Gemini 3.8 Flash is in the low cost tier, ranks level with Opus 5 on LMArena, and returns JSON that keeps keys and placeholders intact.

Sources

Checked . Models change monthly; we re-check this page when they do.

Picking the model is the easy part.

Wiring it into a workflow that runs every week, with evals, fallbacks and a cost you can predict, is the work. Fifteen minutes, no deck.

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