Azure translation character count

Question

I started using Azure translator on the free tier at the beginning of the month to provide real-time translations for my application.

Requests are relatively infrequent as the app is not used very often and requests will translated at most about 4K characters, so I expected 2M free translated characters to cover the entire month.

When I look at the metrics for the month arranged by count, I can see some peak translations at about 20K characters translated on one day and there are a few peaks of around 5K, but when I sum all that up I'm nowhere near 2M. When I look at the sum, there is one peak of 600K(!) and a few around 100K, but a manual sum still should land around 1.7M.

Yet the service was cut off yesterday.

Could somebody please explain to me how the translator's character count works? Does it count several thousands for every request, even if there are only about 100 characters? Or is there some other magic at work in the summation? Maybe a metric which cuts off usage that I missed?

Answer 1

@David Allgayer If you are translating text to multiple languages with a single request then the character count will increase as each language translation counts as a separate translation. This is mostly the reason that the count might be as you have expected but the API will count these and all markup if HTML format is used like HTML, XML tags, etc. within the request body text field. Other things that are considered as characters are:

• An individual letter.
• Punctuation
• A space, tab, markup, or any white-space character
• A repeated translation, even if you have previously translated the same text

The FAQ document of translator has more details about how the API counts the characters.

If you still need help about the usage, you can always raise a support case from azure portal to seek clarification about the billing of your resource. Thanks!!

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