What is Multilingual search?
Verified 5 August 2026
The naive approach runs a separate index per language and translates queries, which multiplies infrastructure and loses meaning at the translation boundary. A multilingual embedder places every language in one space, so an English query retrieves a relevant German passage directly.
Languages whose scripts do not delimit words — Chinese, Japanese, Thai — need character-level tokenisation at both index and query time. unlob uses character bigrams, so 量子力学 indexes as 量子, 子力 and 力学.
How unlob handles this: Languages
Common questions
What is Multilingual search?
Multilingual search retrieves documents across languages, ideally by placing all languages in one embedding space so no translation step is needed.
How does Multilingual search work in practice?
Languages whose scripts do not delimit words — Chinese, Japanese, Thai — need character-level tokenisation at both index and query time. unlob uses character bigrams, so 量子力学 indexes as 量子, 子力 and 力学.
See it working
The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.