Amazon Translate
Amazon Translate
Amazon Translate is the AWS neural machine translation service supporting 70+ language pairs for text and documents.
70+ language pairs
Translation quality lags DeepL and GPT-4 on many pairs
Call Translate.translateText for short synchronous translation, or startTextTranslationJob for async batch processing of S3 documents.
Uptime · 30-day window
GitHub activity
About this API
Translate is the AWS neural machine translation service covering 70+ language pairs. Quality is adequate on generic business text but lags DeepL, Google Translate, or GPT-4 head-to-head, especially on literary text or long contextual passages. The differentiator is AWS integration and customizability: Custom Terminology lets you upload glossaries (e.g. force "Stripe" to translate as "Stripe" instead of literally "stripe"); Active Custom Translation (ACT) lets you upload parallel bilingual data to fine-tune for your domain.
Two usage modes. translateText is sync — up to 5,000 characters per call, millisecond latency. startTextTranslationJob is async batch — translate an entire S3 folder of .txt / .html / .docx / .pptx / .xlsx documents and write results to another S3 path.
If you need high quality, tone preservation, or strong long-context handling, evaluate DeepL (excellent for European languages), Google Translate (widest language support), or call an LLM directly (GPT-4 / Claude). Amazon Translate is best for AWS-native, large-volume, cost-sensitive workloads where "good enough" suffices.
What you can build
- 1Real-time translation of user-generated comments and posts
- 2Localize product copy and multilingual content
- 3Route customer support tickets across languages
- 4Batch document translation
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- 70+ language pairs
- Custom Terminology controls brand/technical term translation
- Active Custom Translation fine-tunes on your bilingual data
Limitations
- Translation quality lags DeepL and GPT-4 on many pairs
- Some low-resource languages are basic-only
- Short context window — long passages lose coherence
Getting started
Call Translate.translateText for short synchronous translation, or startTextTranslationJob for async batch processing of S3 documents.
FAQ
What is the free tier?+
First 12 months: 2M characters/month free. Beyond that, ~$15 per million characters.
How does it compare to DeepL?+
DeepL usually leads on European languages; Translate is competitive with Google on Asian languages. Run your own benchmark for specific use cases.
How do I keep brand names from being translated?+
Upload a Custom Terminology CSV mapping source to target terms, then reference it via the TerminologyNames parameter at call time.
Technical details
- Auth type
- api_key
- Pricing
- paid
- Protocols
- REST
- SDKs
- python, javascript, java, go, ruby, csharp
- Response time
- 43 ms
- Last health check
- 6/26/2026, 6:22:16 AM
Endpoints
Parsed from the OpenAPI spec. Showing 12 of 18 non-deprecated endpoints.
/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.CreateParallelData/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.DeleteParallelData/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.DeleteTerminology/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.DescribeTextTranslationJob/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.GetParallelData/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.GetTerminology/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.ImportTerminology/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.ListLanguages/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.ListParallelData/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.ListTagsForResource/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.ListTerminologies/#X-Amz-Target=AWSShineFrontendService_20170701.ListTextTranslationJobs6 more endpoints not shown. See the OpenAPI spec for the full list.
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