Can mT5 model on Huggingface be used for machine translation?

The mT5 model is pretrained on the mC4 corpus, covering 101 languages:

Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Cebuano, Chichewa, Chinese, Corsican, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sotho, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, West Frisian, Xhosa, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zulu.

Can it do machine translation?

Many users have tried something like this but it fails to generate a translation:

from transformers import MT5ForConditionalGeneration, T5Tokenizer

model = MT5ForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("google/mt5-small")

tokenizer = T5Tokenizer.from_pretrained("google/mt5-small")

article = "translate to french: The capital of France is Paris."

batch = tokenizer.prepare_seq2seq_batch(src_texts=[article], return_tensors="pt")
output_ids = model.generate(input_ids=batch.input_ids, num_return_sequences=1, num_beams=8, length_penalty=0.1)

tokenizer.decode(output_ids[0])

[out]:

>>> <pad> <extra_id_0></s>

How do we make the mt5 model do machine translation?

from Can mT5 model on Huggingface be used for machine translation?