Website translation services vs software: which to use

A website translation service is a company or freelancer who translates your text for a fee, usually per word. Website translation software finds the text on your site, translates it with a machine and serves the translated pages, usually for a monthly price. The two answer different questions. A service answers "who writes the translation", and software answers "how does the translation get onto the site and stay current". Most sites that keep changing end up needing an answer to both, and the choice is about which one leads.

What you are buying in each case#

A translation agency sells people's time and judgement. The international standard for translation services, ISO 17100, describes the process a certified agency follows: translation with a check by the translator, then revision by a second person, which the standard makes obligatory, then optional review, proofreading and a final verification. That second linguist is much of what you pay for. The same standard puts raw machine output with post-editing outside its scope, so an agency that offers machine translation with editing is selling a different product, priced differently.

Software sells a pipeline. It reads your pages, sends the text to a translation engine, stores the result, puts it back into the page, and handles the parts search engines read, such as language URLs and hreflang. What it does not sell, unless you add it, is a person who reads both languages and signs off.

An agency owns the words and hands you files. Software owns the delivery and gives you machine output to review.

The handoff problem a website adds#

A brochure goes to an agency as one document and comes back as one document. A website is spread across posts, pages, menus, theme templates, plugin settings, image descriptions and meta tags, and some of that text never appears in your CMS editor at all.

Agencies and their tools deal with this through exchange files. XLIFF, an OASIS standard, exists "to store localizable data and carry it from one step of the localization process to the other". Your site, or a plugin on it, has to export the text into such a file, the agency translates it in its own tools, and the file has to be imported back into the right places. Each round trip is a job for someone on your side, and each one is a chance for a string to be missed or land in the wrong field.

Then the site changes: a price goes up, a feature gets a new paragraph, someone corrects a sentence on the About page. With a service, every change is a new small order and a new round trip. With software, the change is picked up from the site and the new text is translated without anyone exporting anything.

What each one costs, with dated rates#

Published per-word rates give a sense of the service side. Smartling's pricing guide, published 2026-09-15, says professional translators in the United States "usually charge between $0.15 and $0.30 per word", and lists its own AI translation with human post-editing at $0.12 a word. Gengo's pricing page, checked 2026-10-07, starts its Standard level at $0.09 a word and its Advanced level at $0.18, and says it charges no minimum fees. Both are vendors with their own services to sell, and the rate for your language pair and subject can be higher than a starting price.

LangRelay's prices, from our pricing page: the Free plan includes 2,000 words a month for one Site and one language. Starter is €19 a month with 50,000 words, three Sites and three languages per Site. Growth is €69 a month with 500,000 words, and Business €249 a month with 2,000,000. Text that has not changed is not translated or counted again.

A worked example: 12,000 words, two languages, 800 words of change a month#

This is a hypothetical site, used to show how the two cost models behave.

At Smartling's US range for professional translators, the first translation of 24,000 words (12,000 into each of two languages) comes to $3,600 to $7,200. Each month after that, 1,600 changed words (800 per language) add $240 to $480, before any minimum order a given agency might charge. At Gengo's Advanced starting rate, the same first job is $4,320 and the monthly change $288.

With LangRelay on Starter, the first translation of 24,000 words and the 1,600 changed words a month both fit inside the €19 plan's 50,000 words a month. What the subscription does not include is a person reading the result. Somebody on your team, or a translator you hire, still reviews the pages that matter, and that time is the main cost of the software route. Our website translation cost article builds a fuller model of both sides.

When a translation service is the right call#

Some text should go to a professional translator whatever software you use. Contracts, terms, privacy policies and anything regulated carry legal weight in their exact wording. Smartling's guide makes the same point about "public-facing or legally binding text" needing several rounds of review. Campaign headlines built on wordplay often need rewriting in the target language rather than translating, which is a writer's job.

A service also fits a site that rarely changes. If the pages are written once and left for a year, the round trip happens once, and an agency's quality process is affordable at that scale.

You also need a translator when nobody on your side reads the target language. Software can produce a draft, but somebody has to judge it, and if that person does not exist in-house, you hire them, from an agency or as a freelancer, whatever produces the draft.

When software is the right call#

Software earns its place on a site that changes every week. A shop adding products, a SaaS site with release notes, a publisher with a daily blog: each of these generates a steady stream of small changes that would turn into a steady stream of small agency orders.

It also handles the parts of a page an agency never sees. Language subdirectories, hreflang between versions, a canonical per language, the lang attribute, translated titles and meta descriptions are delivery work, and a translator working from an export file cannot do them.

Turnaround is the other difference. Gengo's help center says most texts under 500 words at its Standard level come back in under two hours, which is fast for a person. Machine translation of a changed paragraph takes seconds, and the delay that remains is your own review.

Using both: a translator inside the software#

The common setup for a business site is software for delivery and people for judgement. The software finds the text, translates it and keeps track of what changed. A translator, either on staff or hired from an agency, reviews the machine output where it lives and approves it. You pay software for the plumbing and a person for review time, which per word is usually less than full translation. Our article on machine translation post-editing describes the levels of editing a reviewer can apply.

LangRelay is built for this arrangement. You can invite a translator to a Site by email with a preset that matches what they should do, from suggesting changes to approving translations, without giving them your WordPress login. They work in the translations table or on the rendered page in the Visual editor, at desktop, tablet and phone widths, so they see a button label in the button. Relay reviews any page you ask it to, the way a language expert would, and tells you the cost in AI credits before it starts; a Relay review reports problems as major or minor, which gives the translator a list to start from. 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. If you want to see how a translator's review would look on your site, book a demo.

Questions to ask before you hire a website translation company#

1. Do you translate from our live site or from files we export? If files, which formats, and who imports them back?
2. What is your rate per word for each language pair, and is repeated text discounted?
3. Does a second linguist revise every translation, as ISO 17100 requires, or only on request?
4. What does an update of 300 words cost once the site is live, and how fast does it come back?
5. Who checks the translated pages on the site itself: layout, links, forms and the parts search engines read?
6. Can your translators work inside our translation software instead of in files?

The answers to the fourth and fifth questions tell you most about the second year, when the site is changing and the launch budget is spent. Our QA checklist for website translation lists what that on-site check should cover.