# Getting started (AWS CLI)
<a name="get-started-cli"></a>

In the following exercise, you use the AWS command line interface (AWS CLI) to translate text. To complete the exercise, you need to be familiar with the CLI and have a text editor. For more information, see [Install and configure the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)](setting-up.md#setup-awscli).

To use Amazon Translate from the command line, you need to run the command from a region that supports the Amazon Translate service. For a list of available endpoints and regions, see [Amazon Translate Regions and Endpoints](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#translate_region) in the *AWS General Reference*.

## Translate text using the command line
<a name="cli-command-line"></a>

The following example shows how to use the [TranslateText](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/translate/latest/APIReference/API_TranslateText.html) operation from the command line to translate text. The example is formatted for Unix, Linux, and macOS. For Windows, replace the backslash (\$1) Unix continuation character at the end of each line with a caret (^). At the command line, type the following. 

```
aws translate translate-text \
            --region region \
            --source-language-code "en" \
            --target-language-code "es" \
            --text "hello, world"
```

The response is the following JSON:

```
{
    "TargetLanguageCode": "es",
    "Text": "Hola, mundo",
    "SourceLanguageCode": "en"
}
```

## Next step
<a name="getting-started-next-examples"></a>

To see other ways to use Amazon Translate see [Code examples for Amazon Translate using AWS SDKs](service_code_examples.md).