How Much Does It Cost to Translate a Website? (2026 Guide)

Summarize this post with: 12 min read

ChatGPT Perplexity Grok Google AI

Translating a website costs anywhere from $0 to several thousand dollars per language, and the number that matters is words × languages × method. Machine translation through a website translation platform usually costs a monthly subscription (on ConveyThis, from $0 for up to 5,000 translated words to $24 a month for 100,000 words in 3 languages), while professional human translation is typically quoted at around $0.10 to $0.16 per word for general business content, per language, before updates.

So a 20,000-word site going into three languages needs 60,000 translated words. On a subscription that fits the Business plan at $24 a month. Paid to an agency at those per-word rates, the same 60,000 words cost roughly $6,000 to $9,600 up front, and every new page is another order.

Key takeaways

• Count first. Translated words = words on your site × number of added languages. Everything else follows from that number.
• Method sets the price range. Machine translation is cheap per word, human translation is expensive per word, and a hybrid (machine first, human review on the pages that matter) sits in between.
• Tooling is a separate cost. Somebody has to extract the text, serve the translated pages, keep them in sync and make them indexable. That is what a translation platform or plugin charges for.
• Budget for maintenance, not just launch. A site that changes every week keeps generating new words to translate.
• SEO is part of the cost. Translated pages only bring search traffic if they have their own URLs, hreflang tags and translated metadata.

How to estimate your website translation cost in 4 steps

1. Count the words on your site

You need the number of words a visitor can read, including menus, buttons, product descriptions, blog posts and footer text, counted once: text that repeats on every page, such as the menu and footer, only needs translating once.

Two practical ways to get it:

• Run your domain through a crawler that counts words per page. ConveyThis has a free website word counter that estimates words per page and for the whole site.
• Estimate by hand: average words per page × number of pages. A 40-page site with about 500 words per page has roughly 20,000 words.

Once you have a word count, the free translation cost calculator turns words, languages and sites into the plan and monthly price that fit.

2. Multiply by the number of languages

Every language is a separate translation of the same text:

Translated words = unique words on the site × number of added languages

3. Choose the translation method for each part of the site

You do not have to pick one method for everything. Many teams machine-translate the whole site, then pay for human review only on the homepage, key landing pages, checkout and legal pages. Section 4 below compares the three methods.

4. Add tooling, SEO and maintenance

The translation itself is only one line of the budget. The table in the “What you are really paying for” section lists the rest.

Machine vs human vs hybrid: what each costs

Machine translation

The raw cost of machine translation is very low. As an example, Google’s own Cloud Translation pricing page lists neural machine translation at $20 per million characters after the first 500,000 characters each month, which are free. If you assume about six characters per English word including spaces, 60,000 words is roughly 360,000 characters, which falls inside that free allowance.

That is why nobody really pays for “machine translation” on its own. What you pay for is everything around it: detecting the text on your pages, storing and serving the translations, letting you edit them, and publishing translated pages that search engines can index. Website translation platforms bundle all of that into a subscription priced by translated words and languages.

Best for: getting a whole site live in several languages quickly, large catalogs, support content, and first drafts that a human will review.

Human translation

Professional translators and agencies usually charge per word, per language. Published rates vary by language pair, subject and turnaround:

• AdHoc Translations, a translation agency, publishes 2026 ranges of USD 0.10 to 0.16 per word for general business content, USD 0.15 to 0.30 for specialist medical, legal or technical text, and USD 0.05 to 0.12 for machine translation post-editing.
• An analysis of US government contract proposals by the General Services Administration, reported by Slator in 2016, found an average of USD 0.21 per word across ten languages, from USD 0.08 to 0.30 for English to Spanish and USD 0.14 to 0.57 for English to Japanese and Korean. The data is older, but it shows how much the language pair moves the price.

At those rates, human translation of a 20,000-word site is roughly $2,000 to $3,200 per language for general content, before any updates. Some agencies also add minimum fees, rush fees, or charges for file preparation and formatting.

Best for: legal terms, medical or financial content, your homepage and top landing pages, ad copy and anything where tone decides whether people buy.

Hybrid: machine first, human where it counts

The hybrid approach is how most growing sites do it: machine-translate everything, then have a person review the pages that carry revenue or legal risk. You get full coverage at subscription cost and pay human rates on a small share of the words. If the reviewer is a bilingual employee, the extra cost is their time rather than a per-word invoice.

A glossary (so product names and key terms are translated the same way everywhere) and translation memory (so repeated sentences are reused instead of retranslated) keep the review work small. We compare the quality trade-offs in more detail in human vs machine translation.

What you are really paying for

Platform and tooling

If you translate by hand or with an agency, you still need a way to publish the translations: a multilingual plugin, a separate site per language, or a developer building language versions into your CMS. On an existing site, tooling is often the biggest hidden cost of a “per-word” quote, because the quote only covers the text.

SEO

A translated page only brings visitors from search if Google can find and index it. That means a separate URL for each language (for example /fr/ or fr.example.com), hreflang tags that link the language versions together, and translated page titles and meta descriptions. A plain JavaScript widget that swaps text in the browser without separate URLs does not give you any of that. Our hreflang guide explains the tags, and the multilingual SEO page shows what ConveyThis sets up for you.

Maintenance

Websites change. New products, blog posts, price changes and seasonal pages all generate words in every language. With an agency, each change is a new order and a new wait. With a platform, new content is translated as it appears and uses up words from your plan, so you can predict the monthly cost.

Worked example: a 20,000-word site in 3 languages

Say you run a service business with 40 pages and about 500 words per page, and you want Spanish, French and German.

1. Count: 40 pages × 500 words = 20,000 words.
2. Multiply: 20,000 words × 3 languages = 60,000 translated words.
3. Match to a plan. ConveyThis plans are limited by translated words and by number of languages, so you need a plan that allows at least 60,000 words and 3 languages:
   • Free: 5,000 words, 1 language. Too small.
   • Starter ($12/month): 30,000 words, 1 language. Too small, and only one language.
   • Business ($24/month): 100,000 words, 3 languages. Fits, with room for the site to grow by about two thirds.
4. Yearly cost: $24 × 12 = $288 billed monthly, or $240 if you pay yearly (yearly plans cost 10 × the monthly price).
5. Add human review where it matters. If you want a translator to review the homepage, services pages and contact page (say 3,000 words per language, 9,000 in total), budget that separately at the per-word rates above, roughly $900 to $1,440 at USD 0.10 to 0.16.

The same site with a pure agency approach would cost about $6,000 to $9,600 for the first translation of 60,000 words at USD 0.10 to 0.16, plus whatever it costs to publish and maintain three language versions.

Two more quick examples

• Small site, one language: 4,000 words into Spanish = 4,000 translated words. That fits the Free plan (5,000 words, 1 language).
• Online store, five languages: 50,000 words × 5 languages = 250,000 translated words. Business+ allows 200,000 words and 4 languages, so it is too small on both counts. Pro ($64/month, 400,000 words, 5 languages, up to 3 sites) fits.

The full plan ladder, from Free up to Extreme (10 million words, 100 languages) and custom Enterprise plans, is on the pricing page.

How ConveyThis handles the cost drivers

• Words are counted only when translated content is shown. Bot traffic does not use up your words.
• Automatic translation is included in the plan price. The words in your plan are machine-translated without a separate per-word fee.
• Human work is optional. You can edit any translation yourself in the visual editor, invite teammates with team roles, keep terminology consistent with the glossary, and order professional human translation from your dashboard for the pages that need it.
• SEO is set up for you. Each language gets its own URL (subfolders, subdomains or ?lang, and separate second-level domains on the Extreme plan), with automatic hreflang tags and translated meta titles, descriptions and JSON-LD structured data.
• Leaving another tool? CSV and TMX import lets you bring existing translations with you, so you do not pay to translate the same text twice.

It supports 210 languages, has a WordPress plugin, a Shopify app and 35 integration pages in total, and the features page lists the rest. To test it on your own site first, start on the Free plan (5,000 words, 1 language, no card needed); paid plans start at $12 a month.

How to keep the cost down

1. Translate what visitors in that market actually need. Old blog posts or pages with no traffic from a country can wait or be excluded.
2. Start with fewer languages. Launch in the one or two markets where you already see demand in your analytics, then add languages as they prove themselves.
3. Use a glossary from day one. It prevents your brand and product names from being translated and reduces editing later.
4. Reuse existing translations. Import them rather than paying for them again.
5. Put human budget on the pages that convert. Homepage, pricing, checkout and legal pages first; everything else can stay machine-translated with spot checks.
6. Check whether your plan still fits every few months. Word counts grow with the site; so does the number of languages you want.

For a deeper look at per-word pricing from agencies and freelancers, see translation rates per word and how to budget.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to translate a website into one language? It depends on the word count and method. A 20,000-word site into one language is roughly $2,000 to $3,200 with a human translator at USD 0.10 to 0.16 per word. With a subscription platform, a small site under 5,000 words can use a free plan, and larger single-language sites typically cost from $12 a month on ConveyThis (Starter, 30,000 words).

Is website translation priced per word or per page? Human translators and agencies usually price per word, sometimes with a minimum fee. Website translation platforms usually charge a monthly or yearly subscription that includes a number of translated words and languages.

Why do I multiply by the number of languages? Because each language is a separate translation of the full text. A 10,000-word site in 3 languages means 30,000 words have to be translated and stored.

Is machine translation good enough for a business website? For most content it is a good starting point, especially with a glossary and a review of your key pages. For legal, medical and high-stakes marketing copy, plan on a human translator or reviewer.

Does translating my website help SEO? Only if each language has its own indexable URL, hreflang tags and translated metadata. Translation that happens only in the visitor’s browser does not create pages that search engines can rank.

Next step

Count your words, multiply by your languages, and match the total to a plan on the pricing page. If you want to see the result on your own site, create a ConveyThis account and translate a few pages before you decide how much human review you need.