Azure Translate Is Giving Unauthorized

Hey Kartik Roy, Sorry you’re hitting this—401 Unauthorized and the portal message “Translation failed. Please try again later.” are usually tied to authentication/authorization or a service-side disruption (less commonly, request/config issues).

For Translator REST API calls, HTTP 401 indicates the request isn’t authorized. The troubleshooting guidance is to:

• Check that your key or token is valid
• Make sure the key/token is being used with the correct Translator region/endpoints
• If you’re using access tokens, confirm the token hasn’t expired (tokens expire quickly)
• If you’re using Entra ID / Managed Identity, confirm the identity has the correct permissions/roles for Translator

Quick checks based on common causes

1. If you use Key-based auth
   • Verify the subscription key you’re using is still valid/active.
   • If you recently rotated/disabled keys, regenerate and update the key used by your API calls.
   • Also ensure your requests are targeting the correct region (the doc specifically calls out “in the correct region”).
2. If you use Access Tokens
   • Re-generate the access token and retry. (Doc guidance notes tokens are only valid for a short time.)
3. If you use Entra ID / Managed Identity
   • Ensure the managed identity has the correct permissions to access the Translator service.
   • For scenarios involving storage access (relevant to document translation), ensure proper access like Storage Blob Data Contributor.

Portal-specific angle (resource “Translation failed”)

Since the portal test is also failing, that suggests it’s not just an API payload issue—authentication/config or a potential regional/service issue becomes more likely. The general Translator troubleshooting guidance includes:

• Verify endpoint usage and configuration for the correct Translator resource
• Consider checking for service-level outages affecting your region

Please provide the below information.

1. Are they using key-based auth, access token, or Entra ID / managed identity?
2. If key-based: did they rotate/regen the key recently or change deployment/config?
3. Are their requests going to the resource-specific endpoint for that Translator resource (and the right region)?
4. Do the 401 responses include any request identifiers (for correlation in logs)?
5. Is this affecting text translation only, or also document translation?
6. What error do they see in the browser/network call from the portal test (status + any error body/code)?

If you share which auth method you’re using (key vs access token vs Entra/MI) and the exact 401 response details from one failed call, I can help narrow it down to the most likely fix.

Kindly let us know if the above helps or you need further assistance on this issue.

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