Code in Your Native Tongue: Amazon Q Developer Goes Global
In a significant move toward AI democratization, Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced that Amazon Q Developer — its AI-powered coding assistant — now supports multiple spoken languages beyond English.
Developers can now interact with the tool in languages including Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, Japanese, and Korean, opening generative AI (GenAI) capabilities to a much broader global audience.
This update is available in VS Code and JetBrains IDE extensions as well as in the Q Command Line Interface (QCLI), with AWS Management Console support coming soon, wrote Brian Beach, principal tech lead for developer experience at AWS, in a blog post.
This move represents a major step in making AI development tools more inclusive and accessible.
While English remains the lingua franca of programming, the reality of modern software development extends far beyond code, Beach said.
“Developers worldwide use Amazon Q Developer to discuss architecture decisions, create documentation, design user interfaces, and build applications that serve global audiences,” he wrote. “By expanding language support, Amazon Q Developer now enables developers to have more natural, fluid conversations about complex technical concepts in their preferred language, whether they’re designing system architecture, generating documentation, or planning application localization strategies.”
Breaking Down the Language Barrier
According to IDC, the largest developer populations are concentrated in non-English-speaking countries like China and India. Yet until now, most AI coding assistants have forced these developers to operate in English, creating what AWS calls a “cognitive burden.”
“This actually reduces the cognitive burden on developers where you have to translate from English… you’re most likely thinking in your own native language or mother tongue, and then you convert it in English and then converse with these services and the models,” Srini Iragavarapu, director of generative AI applications and developer experiences at AWS, told The New Stack.
For many developers, this translation process has been an invisible tax on productivity, requiring mental context switching that interrupts the flow of development work, Iragavarapu said.
“This could lead to a lot more innovation and growth in these diverse markets that may have been previously underserved by these AI tools… in countries like India, Germany, China, who have these huge populations of developers,” he said.
English Rules?
Earlier this year, I wrote an article about English as a programming language, and due to GenAI, English could become the most widely used programming language. That article generated lots of discussion, including a few razzes.
“Native Mandarin speakers might disagree with your premise that English will dethrone Python,” Chris Richardson, a software architecture expert, Java Champion, and old pal, chided.
How It Works
Amazon Q Developer’s multilingual capabilities extend across all its core features. Developers can use their preferred language to:
- Explain existing codebases
- Generate new functions and code
- Create documentation
- Design system architecture
- Test code
- Review code
During a demonstration, AWS showed the tool responding to commands in German and Korean, explaining codebases and generating new functions with contextually appropriate code comments in those languages.
Amazon Q Developer enables developers to switch languages mid-conversation, with Q Developer automatically detecting and adapting to the developer’s language choice. “If you’re multilingual and you want to try it out, then you can do that as well,” Iragavarapu noted.
Customer Impact
Even before the introduction of multilingual support, AWS said Amazon Q Developer delivered productivity gains for global customers:
- Japan Research Institute reported upgrading Java applications in minutes instead of days.
- Persistent Systems improved developer productivity by 83% when migrating applications from Java 8 to 17.
- Eviden, a company in France, saw a 20% increase in delivery velocity and up to 40% productivity gains for cloud native development.
With the addition of native language support, these benefits are expected to extend to an even broader developer base.
“Not only did it come because we could do this, this actually came because customers wanted it after using the base tool with Q Developer,” Iragavarapu emphasized, highlighting that the feature was driven by customer demand rather than just technological possibility.
Global Innovation Potential
The implications of this update extend beyond individual productivity gains. By removing language barriers, AWS is potentially unlocking innovation in markets that have been underserved by AI tools.
Though it may seem counterintuitive initially, the work companies like AWS have put into supporting multiple languages natively underscores the importance of human language, spoken or written in “any” language, as the vehicle of thought used by humans working together with AI, said Brad Shimmin, an analyst at the Futurum Group.
“The trouble is that most AI foundational models from Google, AWS, Anthropic, etc., have been trained predominantly in the English language and, therefore, carry a substantial bias toward the unique characteristics of that language, Shimmin told The New Stack. “Taking a foundational model and teaching it how not just to understand but also respect and honor the cultural mores that come with underrepresented languages like Japanese can be difficult.”
Still, it is vitally important to create a more inclusive and responsible AI model.
“So far, we’ve seen a degree of multilingual capabilities, at least in terms of teaching a model how to understand and move between languages,” Shimmin said. “But we need more than anything a more fundamental approach that goes beyond basic transliteration to embrace culture — something like the work we’ve seen from Cohere with Aya, Mistral with Saba, and now Amazon Q Developer, for example. English may be the lingua franca of science, technology, and business.”
Fulfilling AWS’s Vision
The multilingual update aligns with predictions made by Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, who suggested in his 2024 tech predictions that large language models (LLMs) would be trained on culturally diverse data.
“This is how you see that trend of LLMs being more inclusive and the services that we’re building — Amazon Q Developer in this case — is also more inclusive for anybody to be able to do this,” said Iragavarapu.
The move also supports AWS’s broader mission of democratizing AI tools and technology, making them accessible to developers regardless of their native language or geographic location.
Availability
The expanded language support is available now in both the Free and Pro Tiers of Amazon Q Developer.
Raising Expectations
While AWS is pioneering multilingual support in AI coding assistants, this development signals a potential shift in the industry. As global software development continues to expand, tools that accommodate diverse linguistic backgrounds may become the expectation.
Amazon Q Developer now provides complete responses in different languages, but it also maintains technical accuracy while adapting to linguistic nuances, Beach wrote.
“Furthermore, Q Developer now suggests follow-up questions and responses in the user’s chosen language, creating a more intuitive and seamless experience for developers worldwide. This natural flow of conversation in any language helps maintain the developer’s focus and flow, eliminating the mental overhead of constant translation,” he wrote.
For developers working in global teams or those who simply prefer to code in their native language, Amazon Q Developer’s multilingual support removes a significant barrier to adoption and could help accelerate the integration of AI assistants into everyday development workflows.
As Iragavarapu noted to The New Stack, “This is part of us making AWS and AI more accessible to everybody across the community.”
Amazon Q Developer is now speaking everyone’s language.
