Quotas and limits

Cloud Translation enforces quotas on the content size of requests and the number of requests that you can send. Quotas protect the community of Google Cloud users by preventing unforeseen spikes in usage. You can also lower your quotas to prevent excessive usage and control costs.

If you exceed your quota, Cloud Translation returns a 403 error. The error message states Daily Limit Exceeded if you exceeded a daily quota or User Rate Limit Exceeded if you exceeded a per minute quota.

Daily quotas reset at midnight Pacific Time, which means new quotas can take up to 24 hours to become effective.

Set usage quotas

By default, the number of characters that you can send per day is unlimited. If you have a set budget, we recommend monitoring your daily usage and adjusting quotas according to your planned spend.

You can edit your quotas by using the Google Cloud console quotas page. v2 quotas apply to Cloud Translation - Basic and v3 quotas apply to Cloud Translation - Advanced.

Content quotas

Content quotas apply to synchronous requests for the translateText, detectLanguage, and translateDocument methods. For asynchronous requests, such as batch text translations, only the request quotas apply.

All characters that you send to the Cloud Translation API count toward content quotas, including whitespace characters. If you use Cloud Translation - Basic and Cloud Translation - Advanced together, these quotas are cumulative.

For text translations, custom model quotas are counted separately and don't count against the general model quotas. However, there is a limit on the number of custom models requested in a single day from a project.

Per user quotas apply to the number of requests that an end user, who is using a client application, can make per minute. When you use a service account, the service account's identity is the user for quota purposes. If you use Cloud Translation - Basic and an API key, Cloud Translation uses the client's IP address to enforce this limit.

Content limit per request

The Cloud Translation API is optimized for translating smaller requests. The recommended maximum length for each request is 5K characters (code points). However, the more characters that you include, the higher the response latency. For Cloud Translation - Advanced, the maximum number of code points for a single request is 30K. Cloud Translation - Basic has a maximum request size of 100K bytes. An alternative option is to use batch translations to send more content per request as a long running operation.

The Cloud Translation API rejects requests larger than the maximum and gives a 400 INVALID_ARGUMENT error regardless of the available quota.

Request quotas

Cloud Translation applies a quota on the number of requests that you can send to the service. These quotas apply to all Cloud Translation method calls except for the translateDocument and getSupportedLanguages methods, which have their own request or content quotas.

Custom model quotas are counted separately and don't count against the other v3 request quotas.

Per user quotas apply to the number of requests that an end user, who is using a client application, can make per minute. When you use a service account, the service account's identity is the user for quota purposes. If you use Cloud Translation - Basic and an API key, Cloud Translation uses the client's IP address to enforce this limit.

Counting quotas

For Cloud Translation - Basic, content and request quotas are counted against the project that is making the request, which is determined by the key that is used in the request.

For Cloud Translation - Advanced, content quota is checked against the project that is associated with the model in the request. The request quotas are checked against the project that is making the request.

For example, in the following translate text request, the request quotas are checked against project-id-1 because the request is coming from project-id-1. The content quota is checked against project-id-2 because the request is using a model in that project.

POST https://translation.googleapis.com/v3/projects/project-id-1/locations/us-central1:translateText
{
  "Model":"projects/project-id-2/locations/us-central1/models/model-id",
  "sourceLanguageCode": "en",
  "targetLanguageCode": "ru",
  "contents": ["Dr. Watson, please discard your trash."]
}

Cloud Translation - Advanced limits

The following table describes Cloud Translation - Advanced limits, which cannot be changed.

Adaptive translation