Two reasons your listing has to be in the buyer's language, and only one of them is Amazon's

Does Amazon require the local language?

Amazon says so on its own seller-facing pages, and it says it as a requirement rather than a recommendation.

The scope is the detail page, and Amazon spells out what it means: "everything on a product detail page, from the title to the description, bullet points, and product specifications". It extends the same expectation to artwork, saying that text on your videos or images should be in the language of the store too.

Does the law require the local language?

Separately, yes, for a narrower slice of the listing and with a different authority deciding what counts.

Regulation (EU) 2023/988, the General Product Safety Regulation, requires that a product is accompanied by clear instructions and safety information

• A narrower scopeIt covers instructions, warnings and safety information, not your marketing copy. A localised bullet point does nothing for it, and an untranslated adjective does not breach it.
• A different deciderThe standard is a language "easily understood by consumers, as determined by the Member State". The Member State determines it, not Amazon and not you, and it is that national determination which binds you.
• A carve-out Amazon has no equivalent ofArticle 9(7) does not apply where the product can be used safely and as intended without instructions and safety information. So it is a question about your particular products, which is the opposite of the marketplace requirement.

The language of each Amazon marketplace, with its tag

Country names are what every other page on this subject gives you. If you are configuring anything, the language tag is the part you need.

23 stores, 21 distinct language tags, no single shared listing. The tags are Amazon's own published values for each store. The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt share one, en-AE, because Amazon gives all three the same default listing language.

Does a machine translation satisfy it?

For the marketplace requirement, the words are in the right language and the box is ticked. That is not the same as the listing working.

The requirement is about language. Being found is about words. A machine translation of your English title into French produces French, so it answers the question this page is named after, and it can still rank for nothing, because it carries the phrase a translator chose rather than the phrase French shoppers type. Two tests, and only one has a yes or no answer. Amazon says as much in the same place it states the requirement: it warns that a machine translation may not use the right keywords to rank locally, and recommends researching the search terms local to the market. Translation versus localisation works through what that looks like in each of the 23 stores above. For the legal obligation it is a different question, and not one we are qualified to answer: "easily understood by consumers" is a standard about the reader, and nothing here tells you whether a given translation meets it.

What happens when the language is wrong

On the Amazon side, the documented pattern is substitution rather than rejection. Three separate instances of it now.

• A title over the limit is rewrittenSince 27 July 2026 a title over 75 characters is not bounced back. Amazon replaces it with an AI-generated title of its own and the listing stays live.Read the detail
• An image in the wrong language is translatedSince 4 August 2026 Amazon generates a translated version of any secondary image carrying text, with no opt-in and no notification. The main image is exempt.Read the detail
• A listing that cannot be translated is excludedWhere Build International Listings cannot produce a translation, the offer is excluded at creation and you create it in the target store yourself. The one case that produces a visible error.Read the detail

Two of those three are silent. So the practical answer to "what happens if I do not translate" is: usually not a rejection, and usually not a message. Amazon fills the gap with its own content and your listing goes on selling in words you did not choose.

On the legal side we will not tell you what happens, because we have not observed it. Compliance vendors publish accounts of suppressions and notification windows; those are theirs, not ours. The regulation itself says the required language is determined by the Member State, so the authority to ask is a national one.

What Utlista does about it

Briefly, because this page answers the question whether or not you use anything.

Utlista writes the title, bullet points, description and backend search terms for each marketplace in that marketplace's language, using the words that market searches with rather than a word for word translation. One upload file per store.

It does not touch safety text, warnings, compliance attributes or the Responsible Person fields, and it does not check whether your listing has them. It addresses the marketplace half of this page. The legal half it does not, and nothing on this site does.

Where this comes from

So you can check both halves rather than take our word for either.

The marketplace requirement is quoted from Amazon's own seller-facing page on translating product listings for Global Selling, read on 2026-10-21. Amazon's detailed field rules sit inside Seller Central, which is login-gated; if you have an account, your category listing template is the authority and overrides anything here. The language tags in the table are Amazon's own published marketplace values.

The legal obligation is Regulation (EU) 2023/988, published on EUR-Lex under CELEX number 32023R0988 and applying since 13 December 2024. Article 9(7) is quoted above; both it and Article 19 are quoted in full on our GPSR page, which names the date they were read from the official English consolidated text. Nothing here states a suppression behaviour, an enforcement timescale or a penalty, because we have not observed one.