specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: IBM Language Translator
providerId: ibm-translate
created: '2026-06-13'
modified: '2026-06-13'
reconciled: false
tags:
  - Translation
  - IBM Watson
  - Rate Limiting
  - Deprecated
description: >-
  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 The service was deprecated June 2023 and withdrawn December 2024.
notes: >-
  IBM did not publish exhaustive numeric rate-limit tables in public documentation. Limits
  were enforced per service instance and varied by plan. Standard plan customers could contact
  IBM to discuss higher limits for production workloads.
sources:
  - https://cloud.ibm.com/apidocs/language-translator
  - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/watson
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
limits:
  - name: Lite Plan Concurrency
    scope: instance
    metric: requests-per-minute
    limit: 10
    notes: Approximate; Lite plan had significantly lower request rate allowances.
  - name: Standard Plan Concurrency
    scope: instance
    metric: requests-per-minute
    limit: 50
    notes: >-
      Approximate; Standard plan customers with high-volume needs could contact IBM for
      enterprise limits.
  - name: Character Limit Per Request
    scope: request
    metric: characters
    limit: 50000
    notes: Single translate request capped at 50,000 characters.
policies:
  - name: Backoff Strategy
    description: >-
      Use exponential backoff with jitter when receiving HTTP 429 responses. Honor any
      Retry-After header returned by the IBM Cloud API gateway.
  - name: Authentication
    description: >-
      All requests required IBM IAM authentication via a Bearer token obtained from
      https://iam.cloud.ibm.com/identity/token using an API key.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com