Enforce exact term translations in Amazon Translate with a custom terminology resource applied to real-time and batch jobs
domain: docs.aws.amazon.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Build a terminology file (CSV, TSV, or TMX) with source terms and their required translation per target language
Call ImportTerminology to create (or overwrite) the named terminology resource, and wait for it to fully propagate before relying on it
For real-time calls, pass TerminologyNames in the TranslateText request; for batch, pass it in StartTextTranslationJob's TerminologySettings
Inspect AppliedTerminology in the TranslateText response to confirm which terms were actually substituted
Use GetTerminology/ListTerminologies to audit existing resources before overwriting one with ImportTerminology
Known gotchas
Overwriting an existing terminology via ImportTerminology can take up to about 10 minutes to fully propagate — translations issued immediately after may still use the old version
A single multi-directional terminology resource can serve multiple language-pair directions (e.g., both en-to-es and es-to-en) if it's built with all relevant target columns
Custom terminology forces exact substitution and can produce ungrammatical output around the inserted term (no inflection/agreement) — it's a blunter tool than parallel data (ACT) for stylistic control
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