TMDB focuses on delivering localized content across its platform. While most metadata fields support translations, person names and characters remain untranslated, though efforts are underway to resolve this. We rely on ISO 639-1 for language codes, despite some languages lacking representation, with a potential shift to ISO 639-3 on the horizon. Additionally, we pair these with ISO 3166-1 country codes, such as en-US.

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.

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

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