AWS Public Sector Blog

14 New Languages and 405 New Language Pairs on Amazon Translate Available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region

We announced the expansion of Amazon Translate in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, Amazon’s isolated cloud region built for sensitive data and regulated workloads. This service allows our government customers and organizations in government-regulated industries to connect with constituents and customers in different languages.

Powered by advanced deep learning, Amazon Translate is a service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable neural machine-based language translations. Amazon Translate now supports the following 14 new languages: Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish. These languages expand upon the existing seven languages already available in Amazon Translate in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. With the new languages, we are adding 405 new language pairs for a total of 417. For a full list, see the Amazon Translate documentation.

Amazon Translate uses deep learning techniques to produce more accurate translation than statistical translation models with low-latency. That makes the service ideal for use cases that call for real-time and on-demand translation of user-generated content. For example, government agencies can provide live chat support to citizens with Limited English Proficiency (LEP).

Amazon Translate also enables language-independent processing, such as translating content into English for analysis. For example, public sector organizations can use the service to review feedback as citizens, volunteers, and students engage on social media. To see how to do this in detail, take a look at the blog “Listen to Citizen and Student Sentiment with Machine Learning.”

Amazon Translate can also be used to save cost and time for professional human translators when translating policy and other official documents. We have been working with a number of Language Service Providers (LSPs) to offer end-to-end translation services using Amazon Translate to produce a high-quality draft translation quickly. This translation is then edited by professional linguists for a human quality result.

How can you get started with Amazon Translate?

If you are a first-time user, we recommend that you read the following sections of the Amazon Translate documentation:

  1. How it Works – Introduces Amazon Translate.
  2. Getting Started with Amazon Translate – Explains how to set up your AWS account and test Amazon Translate.
  3. Examples – Provides code examples in Java and Python. Use them to explore how Amazon Translate works.
  4. API Reference – Contains reference documentation for Amazon Translate operations.

Learn more about AWS GovCloud (US) here or contact the AWS GovCloud (US) team with any questions.