Lara Translate Model Context Protocol (MCP) server – exposes Lara Translate API (translation, language-detection, TM management) as an MCP-compatible tool.
https://github.com/translated/lara-mcpIf you're building multilingual applications, you've probably noticed that even GPT-4 struggles with non-English translations. The Lara MCP server fixes this by connecting your AI tools to professional-grade translation models designed specifically for accuracy across languages.
Generic LLMs excel at English because that's what dominates their training data. But when you need quality translations to Spanish, German, Japanese, or dozens of other languages, you're working with models that simply weren't optimized for the task. The result? Translations that miss cultural context, butcher technical terminology, and sound unnatural to native speakers.
Lara MCP bridges this gap by routing translation requests to specialized Translation Language Models (T-LMs) trained on billions of professionally translated segments. Instead of hoping your LLM gets the nuance right, you get translations that actually work in production.
Here's something that might surprise you: using Lara can actually save money on your OpenAI API bills. Since LLM tokenization is optimized for English, processing non-English content is expensive and inefficient.
With Lara MCP, you translate content to English first, then let your LLM process the optimized tokens. You get better results at a lower cost per operation.
Building consistent multilingual experiences requires more than one-off translations. Lara MCP includes full translation memory management:
// Add a translation to memory for future reuse
{
"tool": "add_translation",
"memory_id": "product_terms",
"source": "en-US",
"target": "es-ES",
"sentence": "User authentication failed",
"translation": "Error de autenticación del usuario"
}
Multilingual Documentation: Automatically translate API docs, maintaining technical accuracy across languages while preserving code examples and formatting.
Customer Support: Process support tickets in any language, translate to English for your team, then respond in the customer's native language with contextually appropriate terminology.
Content Localization: Handle product descriptions, marketing copy, and user interfaces with translations that sound natural rather than robotic.
Code Comments and Documentation: Translate technical documentation while preserving the precise meaning of complex concepts.
The MCP protocol means setup is standardized across AI clients. Add this to your Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible tool:
{
"mcpServers": {
"lara-translate": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@translated/lara-mcp@latest"],
"env": {
"LARA_ACCESS_KEY_ID": "your_key_here",
"LARA_ACCESS_KEY_SECRET": "your_secret_here"
}
}
}
}
Then test it immediately:
Translate with Lara "Hello world" to Spanish
You'll see the difference in quality on the first translation.
Lara MCP isn't just about converting text between languages. It's about building multilingual capabilities that scale:
The MCP server runs independently and connects to any MCP-compatible AI client. Your API credentials stay secure, translation requests are processed in parallel with your LLM operations, and you maintain full control over translation parameters through natural language instructions.
Whether you're debugging multilingual applications, building customer-facing features, or maintaining technical documentation across languages, Lara MCP handles the translation complexity so you can focus on building great software.
The specialized translation models, cost efficiency, and translation memory management make this a practical addition to any developer's toolkit working with multilingual content. Install it once, and stop accepting mediocre translations from general-purpose LLMs.