ByteDance's cloud arm Volcano Engine has released Doubao-Seed-Translation, a general-purpose translation model that supports two-way translation across 28 languages including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish and Russian. The company says performance meets or exceeds leading systems on broad multilingual tasks and approaches DeepSeek-R1 on Chinese↔English, while matching or surpassing GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Pro on general multilingual translation.

Volcano Engine highlights scene adaptability -- from office documents and technical/medical content to internet slang and classical Chinese -- claiming "natural, idiomatic output without a translation tone." The model supports 4K context and 3K output length, auto-detects the source language, and can be invoked by specifying only the target language.

List prices are ¥1.20 per 1 million input characters and ¥3.60 per 1 million output characters, which convert to about $0.17 (input) and about $0.51 (output).

Volcano Engine's product pages also show Doubao-Seed-Translation available alongside other new Doubao releases on the Ark platform.