IBM Language Translator · Rate Limits

Ibm Translate Rate Limits

IBM Watson Language Translator enforced per-instance rate limits. The Lite plan was limited to lower throughput compared to the Standard plan. IBM Cloud enforced HTTP 429 responses when limits were exceeded. The service was deprecated June 2023 and withdrawn December 2024.

Ibm Translate Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for IBM Language Translator on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 3 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests-per-minute and characters.

The profile also includes 2 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled.

Tagged areas include Translation, IBM Watson, Rate Limiting, and Deprecated.

3 Limits Throttle: 429
TranslationIBM WatsonRate LimitingDeprecated

Limits

Lite Plan Concurrency instance
requests-per-minute
10
Approximate; Lite plan had significantly lower request rate allowances.
Standard Plan Concurrency instance
requests-per-minute
50
Approximate; Standard plan customers with high-volume needs could contact IBM for enterprise limits.
Character Limit Per Request request
characters
50000
Single translate request capped at 50,000 characters.

Policies

Backoff Strategy
Use exponential backoff with jitter when receiving HTTP 429 responses. Honor any Retry-After header returned by the IBM Cloud API gateway.
Authentication
All requests required IBM IAM authentication via a Bearer token obtained from https://iam.cloud.ibm.com/identity/token using an API key.

Sources

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Tools for rate limits

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  • find_rate_limitsBrowse and filter every rate limit in the catalog.
  • apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
  • resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
  • find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.
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Call it yourself

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This rate limit 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits/ibm-translate-rate-limits"
All rate limits 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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