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 The service was deprecated June 2023 and withdrawn December 2024.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, in the API Commons Rate Limits shape.

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

An exhausted limit returns HTTP 429.

This profile was written by API Evangelist and has not been verified against a page the provider published; treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.

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 Exhausted: HTTP 429
Method: generated, dated 2026-06-13.
Written by API Evangelist on 2026-06-13 and not verified against a page the provider published. Treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.
View Source
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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curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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