Fact · Languages and accents
18.9BLEU points
On the Fleurs read-speech test, Whisper large-v2 scored 18.9 BLEU when translating Japanese speech into English.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“Whisper large-v2 27.0 21.2 16.0 29.1 9.1 23.6 18.9 6.2 2.4 5.4 6.1 11.6 21.3 16.8”
Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision (full text), Alec Radford et al., OpenAI (arXiv), 2022, Table 14, BLEU scores on Fleurs (speech translation).
Open the original (DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2212.04356)- What it measures
- The Japanese value is the seventh column of the Whisper large-v2 row in the table, in the block of languages that starts with Croatian.
- What it does not show
- Read sentences with one reference translation. The paper scores Japanese transcripts by character rather than by word, so its transcription figure is not directly comparable with word error rates for Spanish or German.