Amazon Translate

Amazon Translate is a neural translation API service from AWS that enables developers to translate text or documents between 75+ languages in real time or batch mode, with custom terminology and secure processing.

Pricing Model: Paid

Category: Language Translation Ai Tools

https://aws.amazon.com/translate

Release Date: 08/12/2017

• Neural machine translation engine for fluent, context-aware translations

• Support for 75 languages across 5,550 translation pairs

• Real-time (synchronous) and batch (asynchronous) translation modes

• Automated source language detection when not provided

• Real-time document translation preserving formatting (text, HTML, DOCX)

• Customization via Active Custom Translation (ACT) using parallel data

• Custom terminology (defining how certain terms should be translated)
  

• Secure data handling, encryption in transit and at rest, IAM access control

• Scalability and pay-per-use billing, no upfront commitments

• Integration with other AWS services (S3, Comprehend, Lambda, etc.) for translation workflows

Amazon Translate is Amazon Web Services’ neural machine translation (NMT) service built for developers and enterprises seeking scalable, accurate, and customizable translation for text and documents. It enables applications, systems, or content pipelines to translate between languages with low latency, whether in real time or through bulk processing.

Under the hood, Amazon Translate uses neural network models that consider full sentence context rather than isolated phrases. This results in more natural, fluent translations compared to older statistical translation approaches. The service supports translation among 75 languages, covering a wide range of global locales. With 5,550 possible language-pair combinations, it handles diverse translation scenarios.

Users can submit text or documents (e.g. HTML, plain text, DOCX) for translation. In real-time mode, the service returns an immediate translation. In batch mode, large sets of documents stored in AWS S3 can be translated asynchronously, which is ideal for large workloads or scheduled translation tasks. Amazon Translate also supports real-time document translation that preserves formatting.

One of its powerful capabilities is customization. Through Active Custom Translation (ACT), users can supply parallel data—pairs of source and target text—to influence how the model translates specific domain terms, brand names, or style choices without having to build and maintain custom models. Separately, the custom terminology feature lets organizations define how special names, technical terms, or proprietary vocabulary should be translated consistently.

Security and compliance are central: all data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and access is governed by IAM policies. Amazon Translate is part of AWS’s compliance portfolio (e.g. HIPAA-eligible, FedRAMP).

Billing is usage-based: there are no contracts or minimum commitments. For 12 months, new users receive a free tier of 2 million characters per month. After that, standard translation is $15 per million characters; custom translation and more specialized document translation options are priced higher.

Because Amazon Translate is part of the AWS ecosystem, it integrates smoothly with other AWS services like S3, Lambda, Comprehend, and API Gateway. This makes it easy to build end-to-end translation pipelines, such as translating notifications, serving multilingual content, or embedding live translation in chat or support systems.

For businesses handling multilingual content at scale, Amazon Translate offers an efficient way to add translation capabilities, reduce latency, and maintain control over terminology—all while leveraging AWS’s security, scalability, and integration strengths.

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