What translators charge per 1,000 words

Typical rates per 1,000 words

As of November 2026, Gengo's website orders start at $90 per 1,000 words for Standard translation and $180 for Advanced. Those prices come from its starting rates of $0.09 and $0.18 a word.

That gives you a starting budget. It's not a quote for your job.

Translated lists an average of $0.10 a word and puts the cost of a standard page at about $25. Notice the difference in wording: Gengo gives starting prices, while Translated gives an average.

If you're comparing quotes, keep the unit in view. Is the price for a word, a page or the whole job? For this guide's 1,000-word budget, the per-word figure is the one you can multiply by 1,000 without needing a definition of a standard page.

Rates by language

Stepes publishes these per-word rates for translation from English:

• Simplified Chinese: $0.09
• Vietnamese: $0.11
• Arabic: $0.13
• Spanish: $0.13
• Brazilian Portuguese: $0.13
• Italian: $0.14
• French: $0.16
• German: $0.16
• Japanese: $0.17

For your 1,000-word budget, multiply the rate for your language by 1,000. These are Stepes' published rates, not averages drawn from every translator working in that language.

The direction matters here. The list is for work from English, and it doesn't give you a rate for translating those languages into English or into each other.

Stepes lists an overall range of $0.07 to $0.20 a word. But for a language in the list, you've got a more specific figure to work with than that overall range.

What changes the price

The service you choose changes the published price. Gengo separates Standard from Advanced, while Smartling lists different starting rates for machine translation, AI translation, AI translation with human review and human translation.

Here's Smartling's breakdown:

• Machine translation starts at $0.0075 a word.
• AI translation starts at $0.06.
• AI translation with human review starts at $0.12.
• Human translation starts at $0.20.

What are you paying for? Check the service label alongside the rate, especially when you're comparing a machine translation price with a price that includes human review.

A language rate alone doesn't answer that question. And a starting price isn't the same as an average (or a quote for your text). Keep those distinctions in your budget rather than treating every published per-word figure as the same kind of offer.

What translators earn

If you're a freelancer checking your rates, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics gives you a separate reference point: median pay for interpreters and translators was $60,170 a year, or $28.93 an hour, in May 2025.

That's pay data, not a per-word price list. It covers interpreters and translators together, rather than giving a freelance translation rate for each language.

Keep it separate from customer pricing.

The Bureau projects employment in that combined category to grow 2% from 2025 to 2035. It doesn't give a corresponding per-1,000-word rate in these figures.

Machine translation for the bulk

For bulk machine translation, you may be looking at characters rather than words. Assuming about 5.3 characters per English word, spaces included, 1,000 words comes to roughly 5,300 characters.

At Translinga's Quality rate of $5 per million characters, that's about $0.03 per 1,000 words. It's a machine translation estimate, not a human translator's fee.

Translinga is a translation API made by Bitgate for Shopify stores, WordPress sites and apps. Its Fast tier costs $2.50 per million characters, and Quality costs $5.00 per million. Every character counts, including spaces, once per target language.

Already translated a string in the same context? It comes back from memory for free, in about 2 ms.

Credit is prepaid from $5 and never expires. The first $1 is free, enough for about 400,000 characters on Fast. It's in early access: use the Get early access button on translinga.com to ask for a key. No card needed.