Yandex Translate vs Google Translate

What the tests show

Google Translate comes out ahead of Yandex Translate in the English to Russian study listed here. That gives Google the stronger result in this comparison, but it doesn't answer the question for every language.

Savostyanov et al., 2026, published in a Moscow State University journal, tested 60 English to Russian texts per engine. AI judges scored the translations on a 10-point scale. They weren't human reviewers.

The overall averages were:

• DeepL: 8.57
• Google Translate: 8.51
• Yandex Translate: 7.91

Google finished above Yandex, while DeepL had the highest average. Yandex scored lowest in every domain tested (legal, medical and media texts), and the order of Google and DeepL changed depending on the kind of text.

That distinction matters here. If you're asking which engine won this study, it wasn't Yandex. If you're asking which engine is better for any text you might translate, these results don't cover that whole question.

Russian and other languages

For English to Russian legal texts, DeepL scored 8.47, Google scored 8.15 and Yandex scored 7.51. Google led on medical texts at 8.80, followed by DeepL at 8.70 and Yandex at 8.21.

Media texts put Google ahead again: 8.59, compared with DeepL's 8.54 and Yandex's 8.02. Across those categories, Google stayed above Yandex.

But what about Yandex's own Russian benchmark result? Yandex says its translator, trained with YandexGPT, ranked first on the DiBiMT English to Russian word-sense benchmark in February 2025. That's Yandex's own claim, and it concerns a word-sense benchmark rather than the text scores above.

Both results belong in the comparison. Neither gives you a quality ranking for Russian to English, though, or for the other translation directions you might need (the direction matters when you're reading these results).

For languages beyond Russian, we didn't find comparable published quality scores. You can compare how many languages the services cover, but there isn't enough evidence here to call either service the quality winner across those languages.

Languages and features

Yandex Translate works with more than 100 languages, according to Yandex press releases. Google Translate covers almost 250.

Google has the larger language selection. If you need a language outside Yandex's coverage, that can settle your choice without a quality comparison. If both cover the language you need, the language count alone doesn't tell you which translation will be better.

Keep those questions separate: does the service cover your language, and what evidence do you have about its quality in that direction?

The English to Russian scores above answer part of the second question. The coverage numbers answer the first.

Documents

Yandex accepts DOC, DOCX, PDF, XLS, XLSX, PPT and PPTX files, with a file-size limit of 5 MB.

Google's website accepts DOCX, PDF, PPTX and XLSX files up to 10 MB. PDFs can be up to 300 pages.

Check your file first. Yandex's listed formats include DOC, XLS and PPT, which aren't in Google's listed website formats here. Google allows a larger file, with its 10 MB limit compared with Yandex's 5 MB.

Those are upload limits, not document translation scores. The English to Russian test results don't give a separate ranking for translating uploaded documents.

APIs for developers

Both services have developer APIs: Yandex through Yandex Cloud and Google through Cloud Translation.

As of November 2026, Google Cloud Translation costs $20 per million characters after 500,000 free a month. We couldn't confirm Yandex's current API price on Yandex Cloud's own pages, so check it there before you compare.

If you're translating a Shopify store, a WordPress site or an app, Translinga, made by Bitgate, is another API option. It's in early access, and you request a key using the Get early access button on translinga.com. No card is needed for a key.

Fast costs $2.50 per million characters; Quality costs $5.00 per million. Every character counts, including spaces, once per target language. Credit is prepaid from $5 and never expires, and the first $1 is free, about 400,000 characters on Fast.

Google Translate v2 requests work too, with the same language codes as the DeepL and Google Translate APIs.