Translation Rates: A Guide & Calculator

Translation cost per word

Most quotes you receive will be detailed by translation cost per word. This is based on the number of words in the original text for translation. For this reason, it is important to ensure your original content is well-written and correct to prevent additional charges from occurring due to changes made to the source text.

Human translations

When working with a translation agency, the average cost of human translation starts from USD 0.10 to 0.28 per word. However this is impacted by number of factors that we’ll detail in the next section, such as the translator’s cost of living and content subject matter.

Machine Translation

While there are numerous free machine translation tools available such as Google Translate, DeepL and even now ChatGPT, paid machine translation services can increase the quality and speed of translations through customization tools such as translation memory, terminology etc.

The average cost for raw machine translation (MT) services starts from USD 0.00028 to USD 0.00067 per word. This means a 1,000 word document would typically cost between USD 0.28 to USD 0.67.

While machine translations today are increasingly accurate and fluent and can even be customized with company-specific terminology, there are still limitations when it comes to nailing cultural nuances. Therefore it is always best to follow it with a round of post-editin for quality assurance.

As a benchmark, the average cost of machine translation with light post-editing usually starts from USD 0.052 to USD 0.118 per word. While this is more expensive than raw MT, it is up to 57% cheaper than human translation. In the context of the 1,000 word document, that would amount to USD 52 to USD118.

Example cost of translation by word and translation type