Translation Services for Business: What They Cost and How to Choose a Corporate Translator

The four routes

What each kind of translation service actually costs

There are four ways a US business buys translation, and they are not four price points for the same product. They are four different distributions of risk. The figures below use a 50,000 word localization project, which is roughly a mid-size product site plus its help center, and a mid-market freelance rate of $0.16 a word.

The agency premium on that project is $2,400 to $4,000. That is genuinely worth paying when you are shipping five languages simultaneously and somebody has to chase seven linguists across three time zones. It is poor value when you have one language pair and a steady content calendar, because the thing that actually improves quality in that scenario is the same translator seeing your terminology for the tenth time. You can read the full per-word, per-page and hourly breakdown on our translation rates and cost per word page.

Treat the bottom row with real caution. At $0.03 a word, a translator working at the normal pace of 400 words an hour earns $12 an hour before tax. Nobody with a specialism and a full pipeline accepts that, so the work is going to a beginner, to someone outside the US labor market, or through a machine with a cursory glance. Any of those may be fine for understanding an incoming supplier email. None of them belong on your pricing page.

Websites

What it costs to translate a website, and what gets forgotten

Most small business websites hold 5,000 to 15,000 words, so a single additional language costs roughly $800 to $2,400 at the mid-market rate. Get the count from a CMS export rather than estimating from page count, because the discrepancy is usually large and always in the same direction.

The overrun on website projects almost never comes from the pages. It comes from everything around them: navigation labels, button text, form field names, validation and error messages, transactional email templates, PDF downloads, image alt text, page titles and meta descriptions, and the legal pages nobody remembers owning. Ask for those in the initial word count and the quote stops moving later.

There is also a support question that lands the week after launch. A translated site produces inquiries in that language, and a contact form that only your English-speaking team can read is a bottleneck you built on purpose. Some teams solve it with a native-speaking contractor on retainer for a few hours a week, and others by putting a chat assistant trained on their own content in front of the inbox so routine questions are handled in the visitor's language and only the genuine ones reach a person. Decide which before launch rather than after the first complaint.

One more scheduling note. A translator sustains 2,000 to 3,000 words a day, so a 5,000 word site is about two working days of translation plus a day of review. Compressing that means splitting the file across several linguists and paying for a reconciliation pass to make the voice consistent, on top of rush surcharges that run 20% to 100%. Booking three weeks out is free. Booking three days out is not.

Questions buyers ask

Business translation, answered