TMDB tries to be localized wherever possible. While most of our metadata endpoints support translated data, there are still a few gaps that do not. The two main areas that are not are person names and characters. We’re working to support this.

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ISO 639-1

The language code system we use is ISO 639-1. Unfortunately, there are a number of languages that don’t have a ISO-639-1 representation. We may decide to upgrade to ISO-639-3 in the future but do not have any immediate plans to do so.

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ISO 3166-1

You’ll usually find our language codes mated to a country code in the format of en-US. The country codes in use here are ISO 3166-1.

Images do not yet support the language-COUNTRY notation. This will be improved in the future. Take a read through the image language documentation to learn how to partly get around this limitation.

Now that you know how languages work, let’s look at some example requests.

English Example
curl --request GET \
     --url 'https://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/1399?language=en-US' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN' \
     --header 'accept: application/json'
Portuguese Example
curl --request GET \
     --url 'https://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/popular?language=pt-BR' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN' \
     --header 'accept: application/json'