Masking profane words and phrases in Amazon Translate
When you run translations with Amazon Translate, you can enable the profanity setting to mask profane words and phrases in your translation output.
To mask profane words and phrases, Amazon Translate replaces them with the grawlix string “?$#@$“. This 5-character sequence is used for each profane word or phrase, regardless of the length or number of words.
Amazon Translate does not mask profanity in translation requests where the source language and target language are the same.
In some cases, a profane word in the source input might naturally become inoffensive in the translated output. In such cases, no masking is applied.
Amazon Translate detects each profane word or phrase literally, not contextually. This means that it might mask a profane word even if it’s inoffensive in context. For example, if Amazon Translate detected “jerk” as a profane word, then it would write the phrase “jerk chicken” as “?$#@$ chicken”, even though “jerk chicken” is inoffensive. (Here, “jerk” is used as an example only. Amazon Translate does not detect that word as profanity.)
Using the profanity setting
You can use the profanity setting with both types of translation operations in Amazon Translate: real-time translation and asynchronous batch processing.
To mask profanity in a real-time translation request, do any of the following:
-
On the Real-time translation page in the Amazon Translate console, under Additional settings, enable the Profanity setting.
-
In the
translate-textcommand in the AWS CLI, set the--settingsparameter toProfanity=MASK. For more information, see translate-text in the AWS CLI Command Reference. -
In the
TranslateTextaction in the Amazon Translate API, use theSettingsparameter to set profanity masking. For more information, see TranslateText in the API Reference.
To mask profanity in an asynchronous batch operation, see Running a batch translation job.
Unsupported languages
You can mask profanity when you translate to any of the target languages that Amazon Translate supports, with the following exceptions:
| Language | Language code |
|---|---|
| Bengali | bn |
| Hindi | hi |
| Malayalam | ml |
| Punjabi | pa |
| Sinhala | si |
| Vietnamese | vi |
For all of the languages that Amazon Translate supports, see Supported languages and language codes.
