hf_translate: Translate Text

In huggingfaceR: Access 'Hugging Face' Models and Datasets

Translate Text

Description

Translate text from one language to another using a translation model via the Hugging Face Inference Providers API.

Usage

hf_translate(
  text,
  model = hf_default_model("translate"),
  source = NULL,
  target = NULL,
  token = NULL,
  endpoint_url = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

text	Character vector of text(s) to translate.
model	Character string. Model ID from the Hugging Face Hub. Append '":provider"' to select an inference provider. Default: "Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-fr" (English to French).
source	Character string or NULL. Source language code (model-specific; ignored by 'opus-mt-*' language-pair models).
target	Character string or NULL. Target language code (model-specific; ignored by 'opus-mt-*' language-pair models).
token	Character string or NULL. API token for authentication.
endpoint_url	Character string or NULL. A custom Inference Endpoint URL.
...	Additional arguments (currently unused).

Details

The default model, 'Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-fr', translates English to French and is chosen for easy onboarding: it is small, fast, broadly known, and encodes the translation direction in the model ID, so 'hf_translate("Hello")' works with no extra arguments. To translate a different language pair, swap in another Helsinki-NLP 'opus-mt-*' model (for example '"Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-es"' for English to Spanish).

Translation models vary in how they expect languages to be specified. Language-pair models such as the Helsinki-NLP 'opus-mt-*' family encode the direction in the model ID and ignore 'source'/'target'. Multilingual models such as NLLB ('facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M') instead require 'source' and 'target' to be set to FLORES-200 codes (for example "eng_Latn", "fra_Latn").

Value

A tibble with columns: text, translation.

See Also

https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/tasks/translation

Examples

## Not run: 
# Simplest call: English to French with the default model
hf_translate("Hello, how are you?")

# A different language pair (English to Spanish)
hf_translate("Hello, how are you?", model = "Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-es")

# Multilingual model (FLORES-200 codes)
hf_translate(
  "Hello, how are you?",
  model = "facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M",
  source = "eng_Latn",
  target = "fra_Latn"
)

## End(Not run)

huggingfaceR documentation built on Aug. 30, 2026, 1:06 a.m.