Exploring ML Tools - AWS Translate

Published in

Explore ML

3 min readJun 24, 2020

According to one of the surveys there are roughly 6500 languages spoken in whole world. However, I am sure that actual number is definitely more. So, it 99.9% impossible to learn all the languages in the world, but we as human are always keen to know the unknowns. So ideally if we have a tool which can translate foreign language to the one that we know, then it would really take the pain away in understanding someone with foreign language. So, in this blog we will focus on an AWS tool names Translate that does what it says, that is, it translates one language to other.

Introduction

AWS Translate is the neural machine translation service which deliver fast and more accurate result than traditional rule-based approach. It supports wide number of languages along with custom terminology which allows you to specific names, organization and the way it gets translated. It supports batch translation for bulk/short text data and real time translation for short data like chats, messages etc.

How it Works?

Model is made up to two components encoder and decoder which has source and target associated with each, it uses attention mechanism to understand the context.
For automatic source language detection, you specify auto in source language.
Following is an example which converts English into Hindi using AWS cli.


aws translate translate-text \
            --source-language-code "en" \
            --target-language-code "hi" \
            --text "hello, world, How are you"

{
    "TranslatedText": "नमस्ते, दुनिया, आप कैसे हैं",
    "SourceLanguageCode": "en",
    "TargetLanguageCode": "hi"
}

Features

At the time of writing it supported 55 languages.
Automatic language identification.
SDK for mobile development is available which means you can directly utilize AWS Translate capabilities into your mobile application.
Two type of processing modes:
* Real-Time translation: You send short text in each call and you get the output.
* Asynchronous batch processing: You put large text in S3 and trigger the job to process the text.

Usecase

Multilingual chatbot.
* Website which supports multiple languages based on region.
* Sentiment analysis on product review from world wide users.

Usage

You can perform translation via:

AWS cli
AWS Console
AWS SDK
SDK for mobile development

Input

For Real-Time translation we pass short text in the call itself.
For Asynchronous Batch Processing, the documents is stored in S3 and must be in `.txt or .html` format.
Each document must be 1 MB or less in size and must not exceed 5 GB or 1 million in total documents.

Process

Executing real time translation of hHndi language into English in python.

import boto3
translate_client = boto3.client('translate', use_ssl=True)

result = translate_client.translate_text(Text="नमस्ते, दुनिया, आप कैसे हैं", SourceLanguageCode='hi', TargetLanguageCode='en')

print('TranslatedText: ' + result.get('TranslatedText'))
print('SourceLanguageCode: ' + result.get('SourceLanguageCode'))
print('TargetLanguageCode: ' + result.get('TargetLanguageCode'))

Output

TranslatedText: Hello, World, How are you
SourceLanguageCode: hi
TargetLanguageCode: en

Output

If the query is real time then a json response is received as response from the call which is of following format,

{
'TranslatedText': 'Pouvez-vous aider avec la connexion',
 'SourceLanguageCode': 'en',
 'TargetLanguageCode': 'fr',
 'ResponseMetadata': {'RequestId': '8468by00-985d-4827-a266-15ece5fb8645',
  'HTTPStatusCode': 200,
  'HTTPHeaders': {'x-amzn-requestid': '8468by00-985d-4827-a266-15ece5fb8645',
   'cache-control': 'no-cache',
   'content-type': 'application/x-amz-json-1.1',
   'content-length': '108',
   'date': 'Tue, 23 Jun 2020 20:13:13 GMT'},
  'RetryAttempts': 0}
}

Findings

If the input text couldn't convert to target language then it just returns the input text.

Errors

When trying to execute batch operation StartTextTranslationJob api, I received **NO_READ_ACCESS_TO_S3** error despite of role having full access to s3 on all the resources.

Pricing

No upfront cost
Free tier:
* 2 million characters per month for 12 months
On demand:
* $15.00 per million characters
* Detailed list can be found here

Bibliography

P.S. Will update the blog when the batch job testing is completed.