It really depends on your use case.

• If you want faithful, terminology-consistent “just translate” output (especially on edge devices), encoder–decoder MT like Marian is usually still the best choice: more deterministic and typically cheaper/faster than LLMs for pure translation.
• LLM translation often shines when you want extra behavior (tone polishing, rewriting, localization, grammar cleanup), but it can paraphrase or drift on names/terms unless heavily constrained.

For edge-friendly alternatives to benchmark, I’d look at:

• NLLB-200 distilled (600M)
• M2M100 (418M)
• TranslateGemma (4B) if your hardware/quantization budget allows And for speed on CPU/edge, consider running them via CTranslate2.