Definition

Amazon Translate

Amazon Translate is a cloud service for changing large amounts of text written in one language to another language. Amazon Translate supports 25 languages, with the official documentation detailing which languages can be paired up for translation. Users can also customize the terminology that is specific to their organization, such as brand and product names.

Amazon Translate uses machine learning and a continual learning model to improve the efficacy of the translation over time. There are many types of use cases for the service including translating online support content, internally-developed training materials, documentation, application information or instructions and various other scenarios where copy must be made available in multiple languages.

Amazon Translate supports 25 languages, with the official documentation detailing which languages can be paired up for translation. Users can also customize the terminology that is specific to their organization, such as brand and product names.

Potential users can sign in to the Amazon Translate console and translate a section of text as a way to sample the service. They can also use an SDK with a preferred programming language to integrate into an application.

Uses for Amazon Translate

Many companies may use Amazon Translate for external services and communication. Additionally, Amazon notes that it integrates with other AWS services for internal use. For example, Translate can be paired with Amazon Comprehend for pulling out predetermined entities, sentiments or key words from social media or other short-form text. The service can also work in tandem with Amazon S3 for translating document repositories and speaking a translated language with Amazon Polly.

However, using Amazon Translate does not mean that human translators no longer have a role. One potential application of the service is to pair human translators with the machine translation to increase the speed of the translation process.

Amazon Translate pricing

Like other AWS services, pricing for Amazon Translate is on a pay-as-you-go model. The Amazon Translate Free Tier allows translation of up to two million characters monthly at no cost for the first 12 months.

The regular billing plan charges the customer for the total number of characters sent to the API for processing, which includes whitespace characters. Then, Amazon Translate is priced at $15 per million characters.

This was last updated in May 2019

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