What website translation costs

Three ways to pay

You'll see website translation quoted by the word, by the character, or as a subscription. The prices here are as of November 2026.

Human translation quotes use a price per word. Machine translation APIs charge by characters, with free allowances on some services. Plugins and subscriptions have monthly or yearly prices, and some of the plans below come with word limits.

Start with the unit. A word allowance isn't a character allowance, and a monthly subscription isn't the same thing as a quote to translate your site into a particular language.

What should you compare? Your site's word or character count, the languages you want, and the way each service counts them.

Human translation

Gengo starts at $0.09 per word for Standard and $0.18 for Advanced. Translated averages $0.10 per word.

Stepes lists prices from English of $0.09 per word for Simplified Chinese through $0.17 for Japanese, while Smartling's human translation starts at $0.20 per word, so there isn't a single human translation rate to put against every quote.

Keep the labels attached. "From" is a starting price; an average is an average. And the Stepes prices here are for the named language pairs, not a rate for every language you might need.

When you're looking at your own quote, compare the quoted per-word rate with the word count and target language. The worked example below uses $0.10 per word, not a blended rate from these providers.

Machine translation APIs

Google Cloud Translation charges $20 per million characters after a monthly allowance of 500,000 free characters. Amazon Translate costs $15 per million characters. Microsoft Translator is free for 2 million characters a month.

DeepL API Growth costs €23.80 a month, billed annually, for 12 million characters a year. After that, the price is €22 per million characters. Keep the annual billing in view when you compare that monthly figure with a service that charges for usage.

Translinga, made by Bitgate, is an early-access translation API for Shopify stores, WordPress sites and apps. Its Fast tier costs $2.50 per million characters; Quality costs $5.00 per million. It counts spaces too, and counts characters once for each target language.

Credit starts at $5 and doesn't expire. The first $1 is free, about 400,000 characters on Fast. You can request a key through the Get early access button on translinga.com without a card.

Plugins and subscriptions

Weglot starts at €15 a month for 10,000 words. ConveyThis starts at $12 a month for 60,000 words, and Linguise starts at $15 a month for 200,000 words.

WPML starts at €39, with a year of support and updates. TranslatePress paid plans start at €99 a year.

Those are starting prices. Before you put a plan into your budget, check its word allowance and how it counts target languages (Weglot's counting matters in the example below).

But don't turn the yearly prices into assumptions about word allowances. The WPML and TranslatePress figures here are starting prices, not word counts to compare with those monthly plans.

A worked example

Take a 50-page website with 500 words on each page. That's 25,000 words.

At $0.10 per word, human translation comes to about $2,500 per language. For machine translation, those 25,000 English words are roughly 133,000 characters. That's an estimate, not an exact conversion from words to characters.

That amount fits inside Google's 500,000 free characters a month. On Translinga's Quality tier, it costs about $0.67 per language.

Now take the same site into 3 languages with Weglot: it counts your words once per target language, bringing the total to 75,000 words, which is more than the 50,000 words allowed on Business. You'd need Pro at €79 a month.

Same site, different counting.

What makes it cheaper

Check the free allowances against your character count. In the example above, the estimated 133,000 characters fit inside Google's monthly free allowance. Microsoft's listed free allowance is 2 million characters a month.

Then check the language count. With Weglot, the 25,000-word site becomes 75,000 counted words across 3 languages. With a character-based service that counts once per target language, you also need to account for each target language rather than pricing only the source text.

For human translation, compare the rate for the language you need. Stepes' listed English-to-Simplified-Chinese rate is $0.09 per word; its English-to-Japanese rate is $0.17.