Amazon announced earlier this week that it had made its home-grown Amazon Translate service generally available.
Like other Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can leverage the service across websites, apps, as well as text to speech. I should stress that this is a “neural” machine translation service — which has proven surprisingly effective at getting more natural sounding over time. Google and others are also investing heavily in neural MT.
And you can give it a free test drive; according to AWS, the “first The first 2 million characters in each monthly cycle will be free for the first 12 months starting the day you first use the service.”
The major limitation right now languages: It supports English into just six languages, which feels rather retro compared to MT services from SDL and Google. Google Translate, by comparison, is 12 years old and supports 100+ languages (of varying degrees of quality).
And more languages are coming. I can’t comment on the quality of the translation but would love to hear what others have experienced so far.
As I’ve noted in the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card, machine translation continues to gain fans among global brands — not just internally but externally. That is, visitors to websites can self-translate content themselves — a feature I have long recommended for a number of reasons.
So it’s great to see another machine translation service available at scale for organizations of all sizes.
PS: Interesting to see a recommendation from Lionbridge on the home page — a happy Amazon Translate client.
