M2M100 418M failed the quality gate on real articles. Measured on a 420-word
post: "frijoles" came back as "Beeren" (berries), "rompe la idea" as "breitet
die Idee" (spreads it — the opposite), "así sabe mi barrio" as "so weiß mein
Viertel" (knows, not tastes), and the opening sentence was not grammatical
German. Invented non-words throughout ("verforscht", "Treffenraum").
The pipeline itself was never at fault — masking held, structure survived,
zero placeholder failures across 14 files. The model was.
OPUS-MT is stronger on these specific pairs, and fits the existing CX22 with
no server upgrade, which was the constraint. Licence moves from MIT to
CC-BY-4.0, so attribution now ships with the platform.
Routes are verified against Hugging Face rather than assumed — the earlier
research could not reach HF, and half the names it guessed do not exist:
es -> de opus-mt-es-de (small, ~74M)
de -> es opus-mt-tc-big-de-es (tc-big, ~237M)
es <-> pt-br opus-mt-tc-big-itc-itc (>>pob<< / >>spa<<)
de <-> pt-br no model in either direction — pivots through Spanish
Models now live at /srv/mt-models and are mounted read-only rather than baked
into the image. Model choice has needed iteration, and a directory swap beats
a 1GB image rebuild each time. It also keeps model conversion out of the image
build, which matters on a box that OOM-killed the last conversion.
MT_PROVIDER=m2m100 still selects the old engine.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
24dbc9b961