Amazon Translate announces the General Availability of Active Custom Translation - ACT

Posted on: Nov 23, 2020

Amazon Translate is a fully managed, neural machine translation service that delivers high quality and affordable language translation in seventy-one languages. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Active Custom Translation (ACT). ACT gives you greater control and enables you to customize the machine translation output to your needs and preferences. For example, you can influence whether the machine translation output should be “How are you?” or “How do you do?” To use ACT, simply provide translation examples called parallel data (PD) along with your batch translation job request and Amazon Translate will use these examples to customize the translation output during runtime.

ACT produces custom-translated output without the need to build and maintain a custom translation model. With other custom translation products, customers spend a lot of time and money on overhead expenses to manage and maintain various instances of both the customer data and the custom translation model for each language pair. With ACT, Amazon Translate will use your preferred translation examples as PD to customize the translation output. You can update your PD as often as needed to improve the translation quality without having to worry about retraining or managing custom translation models.

Currently, ACT is available in Europe West (Ireland), US East (Northern Virginia), and US West (Oregon). ACT is available for asynchronous batch translation of language-pairs that have English as either the source or target language.

You can find step-by-step instructions in this “How to use Amazon Translate’s Active Custom Translation” post. For more information on Amazon Translate ACT, see Amazon Translate documentation.