The Gengo API

Welcome to the Gengo API documentation. Here you’ll find links to various client libraries, details about our API and a complete list of endpoints available.

If you have any problems or requests please contact our support team at any time and we’ll be happy to help!

Typically we find that the Gengo API is used in one of two situations:

  • You have a large amount of content that would benefit from a simple API workflow
  • You would like to offer translation to your end-users

Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at what key considerations exist in both cases.

High volume needs

Gengo’s API is specifically designed to accept large volumes of content that gets queued, processed and passed onto a human translator.

We recommend submitting multiple orders within a single request. Jobs within an order will be worked on by a single translator per language pair. For quick turnaround, we recommend keeping order sizes between 500-2000 words per order, as these are nice bite-size pieces of content that a translator can typically complete within a single day. For consistency, we also recommend keeping related content within a single order (e.g. product titles, descriptions, and their attributes).

When dealing with such a large volume of content it’s especially important to develop good instructions for our translators. This will go a long way in maintaining a high level of consistency and keep the quality of translations as high as possible. Please contact our support team if you’d like help.

Providing translation to your users

Gengo’s service can be completely white labeled if needed, but we also encourage you to advertise Gengo as a translation partner.

The most important step in providing translation to a customer is soliciting the right information about the content from them. For example, if you were to develop a platform for translating a Twitter feed, it would be important to ask your users about the tone of the content (e.g. formal or casual), the end purpose of the translation (e.g. business or personal) and a description of the feed/business itself. All of this content can be passed on through our API and helps our translators understand the context of the content.

Our GET /translate/service/languages/ end point will provide an up-to-date list of supported languages that should be used rather than any hardcoding.

The POST /translate/service/quote/ end point can be used to generate a cost estimate for the content. Note that this may require several requests be summed together if the number of jobs being submitted is high.

In most situations, it’s best to charge your users directly for the translations while we will charge your account.

Next steps

Once you’ve had a chance to read the API visual guide take a look at the API overview to get a more detailed understanding of our platform.


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The English version of this document is always the latest.