Amazon Translate Now Generally Available

Today we’re excited to make Amazon Translate generally available. Late last year at AWS re:Invent my colleague Tara Walker wrote about a preview of a new AI service, Amazon Translate. Starting today you can access Amazon Translate in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) with a 2 million character monthly free tier for the first 12 months and $15 per million characters after that. There are a number of new features available in GA: automatic source language inference, Amazon CloudWatch support, and up to 5000 characters in a single TranslateText call. Let’s take a quick look at the service in general availability.

Amazon Translate New Features

Since Tara’s post already covered the basics of the service I want to point out some of the new features of the service released today. Let’s start with a code sample:

import boto3
translate = boto3.client("translate")
resp = translate.translate_text(
    Text="?? J'ai hâte d'utiliser Amazon Translate ??",
    SourceLanguageCode="auto",
    TargetLanguageCode="en"
)
print(resp['TranslatedText'])

Since I have specified my source language as auto, Amazon Translate will call Amazon Comprehend on my behalf to determine the source language used in this text. If you couldn’t guess it, we’re writing some French and the output is ?? I can't wait to use Amazon Translate ??. You’ll notice that our emojis are preserved in the output text which is definitely a bonus feature for Millennials like me.

The Translate console is a great way to get started and see some sample response.

Translate is extremely easy to use in AWS Lambda functions which allows you to use it with almost any AWS service. There are a number of examples in the Translate documentation showing how to do everything from translate a web page to a Amazon DynamoDB table. Paired with other ML services like Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Transcribe you can build everything from closed captioning to real-time chat translation to a robust text analysis pipeline for call centers transcriptions and other textual data.

New Languages Coming Soon

Today, Amazon Translate allows you to translate text to or from English, to any of the following languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. We’ve announced support for additional languages coming soon: Japanese (go JAWSUG), Russian, Italian, Chinese (Traditional), Turkish, and Czech.

Amazon Translate can also be used to increase professional translator efficiency, and reduce costs and turnaround times for their clients. We’ve already partnered with a number of Language Service Providers (LSPs) to offer their customers end-to-end translation services at a lower cost by allowing Amazon Translate to produce a high-quality draft translation that’s then edited by the LSP for a guaranteed human quality result.

I’m excited to see what applications our customers are able to build with high quality machine translation just one API call away.

– Randall