Fact · Languages and accents
7.2BLEU points
On the Fleurs read-speech test, Whisper large-v2 scored 7.2 BLEU when translating Swahili speech into English.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“Whisper large-v2 35.3 7.2 9.2 12.5 14.5 16.1 26.6 29.4 17.2 6.0 20.4 1.4”
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 Swahili value is the second column of the Whisper large-v2 row in the block of languages that starts with Swedish.
- What it does not show
- Read sentences with one reference translation. The paper's transcription error rate for Swahili is much higher than for Spanish, so the translation starts from a weaker transcript.