What Website Translation Actually Costs (Per Word and Per Store)

Ask an agency what translation costs and you'll get a number per word. It sounds precise, and it's nearly useless for planning, because you don't know your word count and the per-word rate hides most of what you'll actually pay. The useful question is what it costs to translate your store — a specific catalog, into a specific language, kept current for a year. That number is knowable, and it varies by a factor of about fifty depending on the method you pick.

How Much Does Translation Cost Per Word?

Professional human translation is commonly quoted between $0.10 and $0.25 per word for major European language pairs, with rarer pairs and specialist domains running higher. Post-editing machine output typically costs 40–60% of the full human rate. Raw AI and machine translation costs a fraction of a cent per word. Those three tiers are the whole pricing landscape.

For reference on the machine end: Google Cloud Translation publishes pricing per million characters, which works out to a small fraction of a cent per word — roughly a thousandth of a professional human rate. Human rates are harder to pin down because they're negotiated, but the community rate data published by ProZ and the guidance from the American Translators Association both put common pairs in the range above.

Why Per-Word Pricing Misleads Store Owners

Per-word pricing was designed for documents — a fixed thing, translated once, delivered. A store isn't a document. It's a living catalog where products get added, descriptions get edited, and every change creates new words that need translating in every active language. A quote that covers your catalog today covers a shrinking fraction of it every month.

The second problem is that the quote usually covers translation only. The things that surround it — extracting content, reviewing output, fixing terminology, re-exporting, and doing it again after the next catalog update — are either billed separately or land on your team. For a store, these often exceed the translation line item itself.

What a Real Shopify Catalog Costs

Take a mid-sized store: 800 products, averaging around 120 words each across title, description and specs. That's roughly 96,000 words. Add collections, policy pages, theme strings, navigation and transactional emails and you're at about 106,000 words per language. Here's the same catalog priced four ways, for one target language:

The gap between the first row and the last is the entire reason this decision matters. It's also why the honest answer to "should I use AI or humans" is neither — it's "AI for the catalog, humans for the 5% of pages where a mistranslation costs you real money."

The Costs Nobody Puts in the Quote

• **Re-translation on edits.** Every product description you rewrite is billed again, in every language. Stores that iterate on copy pay this repeatedly
• **Minimum charges.** Many agencies have a per-project minimum, which makes translating a single new product wildly expensive per word
• **Review and QA time.** Someone on your team has to check the output. At even a few hours a week, this is frequently the largest real cost
• **Project management fees.** Often 10–15% on top of the per-word rate for managed services
• **Terminology drift.** Without a glossary, your brand and product names come back different across pages — and fixing that later is manual work nobody quoted
• **Maintenance.** The steady-state cost of keeping four languages current is usually higher over two years than the one-time cost of translating the catalog

When Human Translation Is Worth the Premium

Paying fifty times more per word is rational in a narrow set of cases, and irrational everywhere else. It's worth it for legal and compliance copy, where a mistranslation is a liability rather than an inconvenience; for marketing headlines and taglines, where the job is persuasion rather than accuracy and machines are genuinely weak; for regulated product claims in categories like supplements, cosmetics and medical devices; and for your highest-revenue product pages, where a percentage point of conversion is worth more than the review cost.

It is not worth it for the long tail of a catalog, for blog archives, or for products that generate a handful of orders a year. Those pages exist to be found and to be adequate. Modern AI translation is comfortably adequate — the quality gap has narrowed to the point where fluency is rarely the issue.

How to Cut the Bill Without Cutting Quality

1. **Count your words before you ask for quotes.** Export your catalog and get a real number. Most stores guess two to five times too low
2. **Build a glossary first.** It's an hour of work that prevents the most expensive category of rework, and it improves AI output more than switching models does
3. **Translate in revenue order.** Your top 20 products and the checkout path deserve human attention. Product 640 does not
4. **Don't translate the blog archive.** It's usually the largest word count in the store and the lowest revenue per word. Translate new posts if the market proves out
5. **Use one language as a proving ground.** Get one market to acceptable conversion before multiplying the cost by four
6. **Check what re-translation costs before you sign.** Ask specifically how edits are billed. This is where managed services get expensive quietly

FAQ

How much does it cost to translate 1000 words?

At professional human rates of $0.10–$0.25 per word, 1,000 words costs roughly $100–$250. Post-editing brings that to around $40–$120. AI translation puts the same 1,000 words at well under a dollar. Note that many agencies apply a minimum charge, so a 1,000-word job may be billed as more.

How much do translators charge per 1000 words?

Freelance translators working common European pairs typically land between $100 and $250 per thousand words, varying with specialization, urgency and language rarity. Technical, legal and medical work sits at the top of that range; general marketing copy sits at the bottom.

How much does it cost to translate a Shopify store?

It depends almost entirely on catalog size and method. A typical 800-product store runs around 100,000 words per language — roughly $15,000 at full human rates, around $6,000 post-edited, or a monthly app subscription in the tens of dollars using AI translation. Word count, not language choice, is the variable that moves the number most.

Is Google Translate really free?

The consumer web tool is free; the Cloud Translation API that powers automated store translation is billed per character. Free is also the wrong lens for a storefront — pasting output straight onto product pages without terminology control produces inconsistent brand names and is the main reason machine-translated stores read badly.

Is AI translation cheaper than human translation?

Dramatically — typically two to three orders of magnitude per word. The meaningful comparison isn't cost alone but cost against risk: for catalog content the savings are close to free money, while for legal and regulated copy the savings are small relative to what an error costs.

Does translation cost more for rare languages?

For human translation, yes — a smaller pool of qualified translators pushes rates up, sometimes well beyond the ranges above. For AI translation the cost is essentially identical across languages, though output quality varies more for lower-resource languages, which raises the review effort rather than the translation price.

Should I pay per word or per month?

Per-word suits a fixed, one-time body of content. Subscription pricing suits a store, because a store changes continuously and per-word billing turns every product edit into a new invoice. If your catalog is stable and small, per-word can be cheaper; if you iterate on copy at all, it usually isn't.