Now, as well as coordinating translation workflows and overseeing freelancers, you also need to balance decreasing budgets.
That means understanding translation rates and how to lower them — all without decreasing the quality.
A tricky task, but one we’re here to help with.
In this article, learn what you should be spending on translations and 10 ways you can start decreasing translation and localization costs.
How are translation rates calculated?
There are several ways to calculate translation rates. The most common is on a per-word basis with a minimum charge. This usually means both translation project managers and translators know almost exactly how much a translation will cost before they start. so that’s the method we’ll use for the rest of this article.
Pricing per word isn’t the only model, however. Other pricing methods include:
- Hourly rates: like freelance writing and editing, you can choose to pay translators per hour. A good method for translators you trust, but not ideal for first-time projects.
- Per page: this is a useful method if you have standardized documents that make it easy to estimate a translator’s required time and effort.
- Per project: some translators may offer a bulk per-project price. This is useful if you have a one-off need for translations or want to lock-in a cost prior to starting your localization efforts.
All that being said, translation rates are typically charged per word — so that’s the method we’ll use for the rest of this article.
What are average translation rates per word?
The honest answer? It depends.
As you’ll see below, translation rates can vary depending on language pairs — the language you’re translating from and to — the type of project, turnaround times, and the quality of the translation.
While we can’t give you an average price for translation rates as a whole, we can break down the average cost per word of translating some of the world’s most popular languages:
| Language pair | Average price |
| English -> Mandarin Chinese | $0.23 |
| English -> Spanish | $0.18 |
| English -> Arabic | $0.24 |
| English -> Russian | $0.22 |
| English -> Bengali | $0.22 |
| English -> Portuguese | $0.21 |
| English -> French | $0.20 |
| English -> Japanese | $0.25 |
| English -> German | $0.21 |
These translation rates are averages – expect to pay up to 3X on the high-end. The actual price per word will depend on the language pair, content domain, and complexity.
If you’re going down this route, expect to pay between US$0.10-0.50 per word: up to $500 for 1000 words. That’s for something fairly straightforward and mainstream. The more niche the subject, the higher the price.
Note: If you’re looking for reliable language partners, read what it’s like to work with language vendors, how to choose the right translation company, and how to collaborate with translators effectively.
How much do machine translations cost?
If you’re looking for a free solution, Google Translate and DeepL are the most popular machine translation engines on the market.
If you’re translating large quantities of text, you’ll need Google Translate API which costs $20 per million characters (it’s free for up to 500,000 characters).
If you’re wondering how accurate Google Translate is for specific language pairs, if it’ll work for your content and how you can integrate it into your workflow, take a look at this post.
Note: Neural machine translation engines like Google Translate (GT) and DeepL are a thousand times better than when they first appeared on the scene. Now they recognize things like homonyms (words that sound the same but mean different things) and are getting much better at translating idioms.
Now, with AI evolving at breakneck speed, we can expect to see GenAI translation tools serving up even more impressive results.
Research from Intento shows that Google and DeepL rank highest (out of 18 generic MT engines) for more or less all language pairs, with Google taking the lead:
Note: If you’re in the healthcare, legal, IT, and financial domains, very few MT vendors perform well. Consider a custom engine and use translation memories combined with heavy human post-editing. We’ve covered how to choose MT engines here and how to integrate MT into your translation workflow here.
Even if machine translation isn’t yet perfect, it can already help humans translate much faster. If it works for you – great.
Localization costs: What budget do you need to translate your site or app?
One thing is certain: translation costs make up the lion’s share of your localization budget so it’s the obvious candidate when it comes to slashing the budget.
Translation is a skilled trade. Talk to a professional translator and they’d likely cringe if you’re looking at $50-100 per page for SEO/marketing content.
Sure, every project is different: translation costs greatly depend on content complexity and domain, translation volumes, language pairs, and technology used. But you need a starting point to get an idea of how much the project costs before you see where you can cut translation costs.
Let’s simplify and say the average (relatively large) translation project has 100,000 words and 10 languages. If we do some quick back-of-the-napkin math and multiply the total volume of words by the average price per word and the number of languages, we get $215,000 ($0.215 x 100,000 x 10) – a cost that cannot be ignored in any organization, regardless of size.
While machine translation and AI translation are cost-effective solutions that can work well when combined with human post-editing, you’ll need to assess the risk level of your content.
Either way, you should view translation costs as a multi-year investment designed to help your company execute its strategy and create a continuous cost-management mindset that connects cost to strategy.
What factors influence translation costs?
So, we know that the cost of both human and machine translation varies greatly.
But what are the other main factors that impact localization costs?
Let’s take a look below.
Language pairs and demand
There are over 7,000 recognized languages. The good news is you don’t have to translate your site into all of them. But that’s about as far as the good news goes. To reach more than half the world’s population, you’ll need 23 tongues. (Although most of our customers get by just fine with 10 or fewer.)
Note also that not all language pairs are created equal. While you might be spoilt for choice when it comes to an English-Spanish localization project, the search gets harder if you’re going for English-Japanese. And that’s assuming your site is English-native; if your starting point is Greek, your pool of translation talent is smaller. Again, creating complications and costs.
You won’t be surprised to learn that the more rare your language pairs — and, therefore, the fewer translators available — the more expensive your translations may be. Really rare language pairs may have more steps to translate the copy, either. If you need to translate your copy into one language in order for someone to be able to translate it into your target language, it’s obviously going to cost significantly more.
Unfortunately, machine translation tools don’t cover every language pair, not yet anyway. AI translation tools cover even fewer language pairs than traditional machine translation tools since they’re new on the market.
Localization requirements
The problems don’t stop there. Words may have radically different lengths in other languages and designs should also be able to accommodate right-to-left (RTL) languages. Arabic and Chinese, for example, are written very differently – and take up different amounts of space on the page.
This is where localization really matters. It creates a host of tasks you might not think would be affected:
- The way your web pages are designed
- The customer journeys someone takes as they click through your site
- The phrases they’re used to seeing on code objects like drop-down menus and web forms.
Then there’s culture: the small differences between dialects across world regions. Even if those audiences can read each other’s content perfectly well – a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong has no trouble with a web page written by a Shanghainese – every chunk of content, in any dialect, retains small shades of nuance defined by the author’s experiences. Shades that may not be fully understood by a speaker of another dialect.
And they add up. The Spanish spoken in Madrid differs significantly from that spoken in a market in Mexico City. The everyday languages of the Middle East are a long way from Modern Standard Arabic. And quite a few global languages, like the official Bahasas of Malaysia and Indonesia, feel a bit “colorless” on the page compared to the everyday colloquials used by actual people across the region.
The more tasks your translators are required to complete, the more your localization costs.
The provider
Like with any service — whether it’s a contractor, a writer or a lawyer, the more qualified and experienced the person is — the more they can (and will) charge.
That doesn’t just mean that experienced translators will charge more in general. It also means that those with expert domain knowledge — in medical or legal fields, for example — will also charge more, too.
The type of translator you use will also impact costs. Freelancers, on average, will be cheaper than agencies. But they can come with more risks and fewer additional services. An agency can offer a service level agreement (SLA) and a certificate of translation (a signed statement confirming a translation’s accuracy), for example. But these things will cost more, too.
Type of project and turnarounds
The type of copy you need translating is also going to impact the price. Some projects are easier than others and will therefore be cheaper. It’s easier to translate a customer-facing website than a legal document, for instance.
Length is obviously a factor, too. The bigger a document, the longer it takes to translate and the more effort is required on behalf of the translator. Of course, you may be able to get discounts on large orders, but it’s not guaranteed.
Deadlines also matter. If you need copy translated at short notice then you’re going to have to pay more. Unless you use an AI tool, of course.
How to lower translation costs for your next project
There are several strategies product managers and marketers can use to keep translation costs low. These include quick wins that almost any team can achieve to more advanced methods like adopting specific translation tools to lower costs.
Let’s start with quick wins that many companies can use to trim localization costs by 10% without sacrificing quality.
Quick wins
- Cutting content volume – the smaller the number of words, the less you will have to pay for translation.
- Reusing existing content – find opportunities to merge duplicate content and recycle sections that repeat themselves.
- Keeping terminology consistent – allow content to be reused and lower the risk of incorrect translations.
Consider a situation where translators are working on the 100,000-word project. If you can reduce the amount of content by a meager 10% through reuse, you can save quite a bit on translation.
You would essentially be removing 10,000 words by reusing content from your other sources, which would reduce translation costs by $21,500. In fact, one of our customers in the medical field found a quick win by merging duplicate content from different teams to reduce translation volumes.
While the common advice above can get you a 10% cost reduction or more, the most important thing you can do is understand the level of quality you need for your content to be effective.
Reduce spending based on your needs
Aiming for the lowest cost is understandable, but you usually get what you pay for. While price isn’t a perfect reflection of quality, it sure is a good indicator. However, you might not always need the highest quality; you need what will work for you according to where you are. Being effective means striking a balance between financial prudence and results.
Here are a couple of questions that can help you define your needs:
1. Does your company have a distinct style and voice that needs to come across just right?
If yes, then you will likely need professional linguists and the help of a language service provider to nail your company’s style in multiple languages. Using the cheapest option available will lead to increased revision cycles, inevitable headaches down the road, and in the worst case, brand erosion.
Alternatively, you could opt for AI translation tools, which use your style guide to deliver translated content that’s consistent and on-brand. Try Lokalise AI to see the results for yourself.
2. Does your company need decent translations at affordable prices?
If so, then you can use one of the professional language services available on Lokalise. The costs are more affordable than those of most large LSPs, some starting at a rate as low as €0.07 per word.
Aside from cost savings, you get instant visibility of how much translation tasks will cost, what the turnaround time will be, and can monitor the completion progress in real time. Once the translations are completed, you can get a detailed translation report with the translated volumes to keep an eye on translation expenditure.
Are you primarily translating simple text such as buttons or other product UI needs?
If yes, then machine translation (MT) is a cost-effective solution that can work well when combined with human QA. Plus, human MT post-editing (MTPE) might reduce the overall translation costs, depending on the quality of the raw machine translation.
Getting to 20%: Rethinking processes and introducing tools
It is rarely possible to achieve cost reductions of 20% without organizational change and introducing some tools.
Talk to your team
Think of all the stakeholders you have on your localization team. You likely have designers, developers, project managers, and linguists.
How is the localization workload shared by other departments in your organization? Is your role to provide information to them or to process and distribute tasks generated by them? Do the back and forth and deadlines exacerbate your operational workload? Managing these workflows, especially in the context of internationalization, requires coordination across teams to ensure that content is adapted efficiently for global markets without overwhelming specific departments with the localization process.
If so, the operational cost is likely exceeding value.
Change the process
Often, internal processes become frozen despite the fact that they are inefficient and create more long-term problems:
“What I’ve repeatedly seen in large organizations are small teams relying on their Excel-based process and who are reluctant to adopt new technology,” says Tomas Franc, Solutions Architect at Lokalise, with over 20 years at one of the largest LSPs.
To begin changing processes, create more transparency around “good” costs, those associated with driving business results, and “bad” costs that you can eliminate.
Use technology
If you don’t use a translation management system (TMS), work with an LSP that uses technology. Most large LSPs use tools with translation memories (TMs) to enable their linguists to work faster and reduce costs for their clients.
Translation memory can be a huge advantage financially speaking. Around 30% of everything we do currently is already available in the TM.
Estella Corbellini, Localization Project Manager, MAJORITY
TMs are significant cost-savers both short-term (they start working within your first project) and especially in the long term. Not only do TMs save money, but they improve the overall quality and consistency of translated content.
If you haven’t adopted technology in-house, you have to trust your LSP to use TM for cost reductions. A well-known neobank present in 25+ markets fully trusts the LSP they work with not to charge them for 101% matches. Another fintech company with a $10 Bn valuation pays the LSP they work with to perform engineering quality assurance (EQA) in their own tools.
The best solution? Adopting TMS technology with all of the above capabilities and centralizing collaboration between your in-house stakeholders and an outsourced linguistic team.
Here’s an example from the Lokalise network. The Lokalise-LSP integration is how Withings continuously releases localized products in 11 languages and how Notion centralized their codebase, marketing materials, and help documents to quickly translate 251,000 words.
Note: Before building a direct integration with an LSP, ensure you have a strategy that doesn’t lock you into depending on a single LSP. You should plan ahead as your needs may change and changing the tooling and technology you use at this stage can be costly.
Cut translation rates even further with software
By this point, you may have managed to shave off 10% or 20% of your translation costs by achieving some quick wins or working with an LSP that can leverage technology.
But you’re unlikely to achieve savings of 30% or more by continuing to look within your existing team, tech stack or solutions. If you really want to start achieving significant savings, you need to invest in technology yourself.
Controlling costs with a TMS
A translation management system (TMS), like Lokalise, is a platform that can automate large chunks of the translation process.
“More often than not, I see companies use scattered tools for localization – proprietary CAT tools, financial tools, communication tools, repository tools, quality management tools, etc. Having a holistic TMS that meets all these needs increases productivity by reducing back and forth between stakeholders. As a result, costs decrease, and resources can focus on their areas of expertise rather than on manual tasks.”
Silvia Mapelli, Sr. Localization Project Manager, Blizzard Entertainment
Platforms like Lokalise act as a database of translation keys to ensure that different departments in your company and vendors stay on the same page while collaborating and working on a project simultaneously.
Using a TMS like Lokalise significantly decreases time spent per task, allows for agile localization that doesn’t slow down product development, and allows you to get to market faster.
“But the real savings come with the efficiency of the tool,” says Nadim Dimechkie, Director of Copy at TransferGo. “We release content 2 or 3 times faster and can handle much bigger projects so much more easily. All of our translations are in one place, making them much easier to find and update across multiple languages.”
Automate your efforts
A TMS doesn’t just centralize your efforts, it also comes with a host of features that help you to automate workflows.
“Integrations, such as those with Figma and Zendesk, reduce manual processes and provide huge efficiencies, which allow us to focus on our areas of expertise,” says Nadim.
You should strive to eliminate any work for which the cost exceeds the value. Here are the opportunities to reduce the workload of each department involved in the localization process:
- a) Developers manually exporting and converting localization files from JSON into CSV
- b) Designers manually inputting text into the design
- c) Copywriters, technical writers, and content teams struggling with updates/version control, when the translation process has started either maintaining duplicates per language directly in wireframes or in an Excel spreadsheet with little visual context or storing different file versions locally
- d) Project managers crunching numbers and manually putting together reports in spreadsheets, using different disconnected environments to communicate localization project related questions with teammates
- e) Translators using different files to consult for visual context or to add a glossary term in a spreadsheet, or to email questions trying to identify what text element refers to what screen and keeping track of all incoming answers
One customer had designers spending 25 hours per month manually inputting translated text into the design. Here’s what that looks like in terms of costs:
| Resource | Cost per hour | Minutes per text item on screen | Keys per design delivery | No. of design deliveries per month | Hours per month spent on manual tasks | Cost per year |
| Designer | $30 | 5 | 100 | 3 | 25 | $9,000 |
The time it takes per design delivery after switching to a designer-led localization workflow using Figma & Lokalise? 1 minute. And that doesn’t even include time usually spent fixing localization defects after delivery.
Cuts that will save even one quarter of a full-time equivalent position can have immense gains.
Reduce localization defects
Traditionally, localization has been at the end of the product development process. Often, a product is launched in a single market and then translated to be released in new markets one by one.
By using a TMS with dedicated plugins for designers and developers, you can bring them closer to the localization process and avoid the inevitable issues that arise when localizing after development.
If you’re designing something for multiple regions, you can imagine how readapting the product UI can slow down the entire process. It creates unnecessary work for your team and makes shipping localized products (without errors) nearly impossible.
By reducing defects at the deployment level, you lower the risk of confusing, misinforming, or outright offending customers with your multilingual interface. Aside from providing your customers with a bad user experience, localization-related bug fixes can cost your business over $50.000/year. Resolving bugs early is 10x more cost-effective than making adjustments after release.
| Resource | Cost per hour | Hours per i18n/l10n bug | No. of bugs/release | No. of releases / year | Cost per year |
| Project manager | $40 | 1 | 20 | 12 | $9,600 |
| Vendor LQA | $50 | 2 | 20 | 12 | $24,000 |
| Core QA | $40 | 2 | 20 | 12 | $19,200 |
| Total Costs | $52,800 |
Coordinate parallel activities
Think of all the contributors you have in your localization team. Chances are you’re all collaborating within a program that isn’t built for localization.
How do you ensure that localization teams are working on the correct set of information to avoid multiple iterations of the QA and prevent unnecessary delays?
Streamlining collaboration between the contributors in the localization flow ensures everyone is working from the same set of information and stays focused on the same priorities.
Apart from stopping the endless back and forth between designers, copywriters, technical writers, developers, managers, translators, and reviewers, it allows product teams to collect valuable feedback from linguists before releasing a feature in multiple markets.
Use AI translations
If you really want to keep costs down, then using a TMS with AI translation capabilities is essential. As we’ve already seen, using an AI translation tool like Google Translate or Lokalise AI can slash translation costs. But it can also help you scale faster, saving even more time and money by running multiple translation projects concurrently.
In the past, you may have had to compromise on quality, but not anymore. With Lokalise AI, for example, you can add context like a style guide, information about your industry or your tone of voice, to generate high-quality translations at the first time of asking.
You can also use Lokalise AI’s evaluation features to automatically generate quality assurance reports with pass/fail scores. Lokalise has built-in spelling and grammar checks for 22 languages out of the box and even offers automatic suggestions for your translators to use. So, even if you don’t want to use AI to translate your content, you can use AI-powered tools to decrease quality assurance costs by automatically flagging errors.
Slash your translation costs with Lokalise
If this guide to translation fees has taught you anything, we hope it’s that translation rates can vary depending on a massive number of factors. From the copy you need translating and the size of your project to deadlines, quality and even the tools you use.
But there’s one way to guarantee translation rates that are as low as possible. And that’s by using AI tools.
With Lokalise AI, you can choose to automate the entire translation process at scale using our market-leading Lokalise AI or automate parts of your project like project management and quality assurance.
Find how much you can save by taking a product tour or starting your free trial today.
