Localization Quality and Responsible Use of AI

High-quality localization is fundamental to Prime Video’s global customer experience. Every subtitled, dubbed, or accessibility asset shapes how audiences connect with stories and determines how successfully content travels across languages and cultures.

This document defines Prime Video’s core localization tenets and the quality standards that guide all linguistic work, regardless of workflow or tool. It also outlines how these principles apply to the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in localization, ensuring that innovation enhances rather than compromises creative integrity, cultural nuance, or customer trust. As AI capabilities continue to evolve, we will review and refine this guidance to ensure it remains aligned with industry expectations and responsible practice.

Localization quality at Prime Video is built on six foundational principles. These tenets serve as the baseline for evaluating all localized assets and inform our measurement frameworks.

• Customer Experience First: Localized assets must deliver clarity, immersion, and authenticity. The viewing experience should feel effortless and aligned with native-language expectations.
• Creative Integrity: Preserve the meaning, tone, and emotional performance of the original work. Localization is successful when it conveys the same intent and impact as the source.
• Cultural and Linguistic Accuracy: Adapt content with sensitivity to local norms, ensuring accuracy and contextual relevance in every territory.
• Technical Precision: Adhere to Prime Video’s delivery specifications for timing, formatting, readability, and playback integration.
• Accountability and Measurement: All partners are responsible for meeting Prime Video’s quality benchmarks. Evaluation methods may leverage standard frameworks, such as MQM and DQM, to support objectivity and consistency across languages and workflows. These structured approaches ensure quality assurance is data-driven, transparent, and aligned with global industry practices.
• Continuous Improvement: Defects, partner feedback, and customer data feed into ongoing refinement of localization processes, metrics, and specifications.

These tenets define Prime Video’s quality bar for all types of localization. As technologies evolve, they ensure that scalability continues to serve quality, not undermine it.

AI is reshaping how content reaches global audiences. Machine learning, speech synthesis and automated quality tools can translate, adapt and review material faster than ever before. When applied responsibly, these technologies can accelerate workflows, improve consistency, and expand coverage, while maintaining the localization standards previously defined. Their impact is strongest when complemented by human judgment, especially in linguistically or culturally sensitive contexts.

Prime Video evaluates localized assets using the same core quality principles, and AI-assisted workflows must incorporate appropriate oversight to ensure accuracy, safety, and cultural relevance. To meet Prime Video’s quality expectations, partners must comply with the following requirements:

• Maintain human-in-the-loop oversight. Every AI-assisted asset must be reviewed by a qualified linguist, QC specialist, or creative lead to validate accuracy, tone, cultural sensitivity, and suitability for the target audience. This step is particularly critical in low-resource languages, where AI performance varies significantly.
• Protect data and privacy. Confidential or unreleased materials must be handled securely and processed only in tools that meet Prime Video’s security requirements, as outlined in our delivery specifications.
• Enhanced Review. Materials involving children’s content or culturally sensitive, political or identity themes may require additional validation prior to submission.

AI enhances efficiency, but never replaces human accountability. Prime Video asks that partners adhere to the following ethical standards to ensure that innovation supports creative intent, rather than compromise it.

• Authenticity: Every localized version must remain true to the original work. Emotion and meaning must carry through without distortion.
• Representation: Localization should reflect cultural elements accurately and avoid bias or stereotyping.
• Transparency: Partners must appropriately document and disclose AI used in the creation of localized content.
• Rights Protection: Performers, creators and rights holders retain control over how their work and likenesses are used. Synthetic replication, cloning or digital modification without consent is strictly prohibited.
• Customer Trust: Audiences should experience localized content that feels seamless and genuine, regardless of production method.

Prime Video expects all partners to comply with these guidelines. Partners should understand that the use of AI to localize content may require enhanced review by Prime Video prior to release to ensure that the above requirements are satisfied.

These guidelines will be reviewed and updated periodically as AI solutions and industry standards develop. Prime Video collaborates with studios, vendors and technology partners to test new tools responsibly. Feedback from partners, linguists, and customers informs our localization quality tenets as well as our AI practices.

As technology evolves, our goal remains the same: to deliver authentic, high-quality and inclusive localized experiences that honor the creative intent of every story, no matter how they are created.