Customizing your translations with custom terminology

Use custom terminologies along with your translation requests to make sure that your brand names, character names, model names, and other unique content get translated to the desired result.

You can create terminology files and upload them to your Amazon Translate account. For information about file sizes and number of terminology files, see Service quotas. When you translate text, you can optionally choose a custom terminology file to use. When Amazon Translate finds a match between source text and the terminology file, it uses the translation from the terminology file.

Consider the following example: Amazon Photos provides free photo and video storage to Amazon Prime members. In French, the name isn't translated: it remains as Amazon Photos.

When you use Amazon Translate to translate Amazon Photos into French without any additional context, the result is Photos d'Amazon, which isn't the desired translation.

If you add a custom terminology entry for the term Amazon Photos, specifying that the French translation is Amazon Photos, Amazon Translate uses the custom terminology to translate the phrase to the desired result.

Amazon Translate doesn't guarantee that it will use the target term for every translation. Custom terminology uses the meaning of the source and target term in the translation context to decide whether to use the target term. For more information, see Best practices.