How much does it cost to translate a website in 2026?

Translating a website costs its word count times the number of languages times a rate per word, plus the same sum again for every word you change later. On 2026-10-06, Gengo listed human translation from $0.09 a word, so a 20,000-word site in three languages starts at $5,400 for the first pass. Software that machine-translates the same site cost from about €180 a year to €79 a month on the plans we checked, depending on how each vendor counts words. The arithmetic below works with your own numbers too.

The formula behind every quote#

Every price you will be quoted, from a freelance translator or a SaaS plan, comes from three numbers:

1. Source words: the text on the site in its original language.
2. Target languages: each one is a separate translation of every word.
3. Change: the words you add or edit each month after launch.

A translator multiplies the first two by a rate. A software vendor turns the same product into an allowance: a plan includes some number of translated words, and you pick the plan whose allowance covers your total. The units differ, so two quotes are only comparable once you have worked out the total words each one charges for.

Count the words people do not see#

Visible body copy is the obvious part. A site also carries page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, button labels, form messages and the navigation and footer that repeat on every page. Weglot's help center says its count includes "visible and invisible content, such as SEO metadata", so a crawl-based count is usually higher than the number you get by pasting your pages into a word counter.

Repeated text matters in the other direction. A footer that appears on 40 pages is the same 60 words 40 times. A human agency may charge for it once, or may not; ask. LangRelay translates a repeated string once and reuses it everywhere it appears, and it is worth asking any other vendor how they count it.

Multiply by languages#

Each language is a full copy of the work. Weglot's own example puts it plainly: an 8,000-word site in three languages is about 24,000 translated words. WPML, TranslatePress and Linguise all document the same multiplication on their pages.

Then add the change#

Many quotes stop at the first pass. A site that publishes a weekly post, updates prices or rewrites its homepage keeps generating new source words. If 2,000 words change each month and you run three languages, that is 6,000 more translated words every month, for as long as the site is live.

What human translation costs per word#

Gengo publishes its rates. On 2026-10-06 its pricing page listed a Standard level "From $0.09" a word, for casual content, and an Advanced level "From $0.18" a word, where website localization is one of the listed uses. Those are starting prices; the rate for your language pair can be higher.

An agency that quotes per project may add project management, proofreading by a second linguist and a minimum fee. None of the agency pages we checked publish those terms, so the arithmetic below leaves them out. Get a written quote and ask four things: the per-word rate per language pair, whether repeated text is discounted, what a second review costs, and what an update of 500 words costs once the site is live. The last answer tells you more about the yearly bill than the first.

What machine translation costs#

The raw engine is cheap. Google's Cloud Translation pricing page lists its standard neural engine at $20 per million characters after the first 500,000 characters each month, which are free. If you assume seven characters per word including the space (our assumption, generous for English), 60,000 words is about 420,000 characters and fits inside the free tier.

You rarely pay for the engine directly. You pay for software that finds the text, sends it to an engine, stores the result and serves the translated pages, and each vendor prices that differently.

How website translation software counts words#

Prices below were read on each vendor's own page on 2026-10-06. Weglot's pricing page and WPML's pay-as-you-go rates say they exclude VAT; the other pages in the table do not say.

The last column is where the plans differ most. A fixed total, like Weglot's, is sized to how big your translated site is. A yearly or monthly allowance is sized to how much translation you do in that period. A large site that rarely changes needs a big plan under a fixed total and a small one under a periodic allowance.

A worked example: 20,000 words into three languages#

Take a site with 40 pages of about 500 words each: 20,000 source words. It needs Spanish, French and German, and about 2,000 source words change each month.

First pass: 20,000 × 3 = 60,000 translated words. Each month after: 2,000 × 3 = 6,000.

Weglot counts metadata too, so a 20,000-word body can count higher, which is why the example lands on Pro and not Business. And the software rows are machine translation. They do not include anyone reading the result, which is the cost the next section is about.

The costs that are not on the price page#

Review time is the largest. Machine output for a homepage, a checkout or a legal page needs a person who knows the language to read it before visitors do. A translator you hire to post-edit charges per word or per hour, depending on who you hire; a colleague who does it spends their own time. Our guide to machine translation post-editing covers what a reviewer checks.

SEO setup is the second. Each language needs its own URL, hreflang tags and translated titles, or search engines will not show it. Translated URL slugs cost extra on some plans: Weglot lists them from Pro.

Upkeep is the third. Somebody has to notice that the English page changed and send the new text for translation. With a per-word agency this is an email and a minimum fee each time. With software it is usually automatic, but the review step still needs a person.

How LangRelay prices website translation#

LangRelay counts Billable words: the source words it machine-translates for you, once per language. A page you have not changed costs nothing to keep translated, text shared between pages is translated once, and your own edits and glossary changes use none. Bringing existing text in line with a new glossary term is a retranslation, and that does use words. The plans on our pricing page come from one catalog:

• Free: 2,000 words a month, 1 Site, 1 language.
• Starter, €19 a month: 50,000 words, 3 Sites, 3 languages per Site.
• Growth, €69 a month: 500,000 words, 5 Sites, 10 languages per Site.
• Business, €249 a month: 2,000,000 words, unlimited Sites and languages.

Every plan also gives a one-time welcome grant (300,000 words on Starter), spent after the monthly allowance, which is what pays for a first full translation on a larger site. A year costs ten months. Past the allowance, paid plans charge per 1,000 words (€0.50 on Starter) up to an overage cap on words and AI credits together that defaults to the plan's own price, and live pages keep serving when the cap is reached.

LangRelay builds the review step into the product. By default a translation goes live as soon as it is ready, and free checks hold a page with untranslated text, the wrong language or a changed price. To approve every page yourself, choose Ask me first. Relay, our agent, reviews any page you ask it to, the way a language expert would, and tells you the cost in AI credits before it starts. If you want to see that on your own site, book a demo.

Questions people ask about website translation cost#

How much does it cost to translate one web page?#

At 500 words and Gengo's starting Standard rate, one language costs $45. With software, a page costs whatever share of your allowance its words take; on a plan with a monthly allowance, a page that never changes costs nothing after the first month.

Is it cheaper to pay per word or to subscribe?#

For a one-off translation of a site that will not change, per-word human translation can be the simpler buy. For a site that changes every month, a subscription with machine translation and human review usually costs less, because the change is where the per-word bill keeps growing.

Which languages cost more?#

Per-word human rates depend on the pair. The software plans in the table charge the same per word in every target language, although WPML counts Asian source languages by characters (characters × 0.55).

For a comparison of the tools themselves, read our buyer's guide to website translation software, or our breakdown of Weglot's pricing.