How Much Does Website Translation Cost?

Website Translation should be one of the cornerstones of your market expansion projects. As the business card of your company, developing a website that truly connects with your target audiences, will make all the difference if you wish to establish yourself as an international thought leader.

But how much does website translation cost? Which sub-services are involved? And how are costs kept down in the long run?

Website Translation Cost: An Overview

Website Translation & Localization requires linguistic, cultural, and technical expertise. So when deciphering the bill of your website translation project, there are different layers of services to take into account.

Localization Engineers Set The Stage: Crucial Prep Work

Before the actual translation process can begin, the localization engineers will make the technical preparation to ensure the translation will run smoothly. This preliminary work is charged by the hour and includes:

• In order to effectively extract and reinsert the website content into the LSPs (Language Service Providers) Translation CAT Tool, a translation software used to optimize the translation process, integration will be set up between the two systems. Selecting a suitable plugin will ensure that your content can be exported in a translation-friendly format such as XLIFF (XML-based format).
• If you intend to push content frequently, a translation connector should also be integrated.
• The localization engineer will also prepare the files for translation so that the linguists will only need to focus on performing their translation work. This includes excluding or locking the shortcodes, regular expressions, and none-translatable text. As a result, translators will be able to identify and translate content without changing XML codes. This is particularly important to ensure that your translated content can be imported back safely to your technical writing authoring tool.

Pro tip! Applying coding in a correct way can save you a lot in website translation cost. Learn more about how regular expressions are a crucial part of the early stages in the translation process in our blog on how to use regular expressions to identify translatable content.

Linguistic Tools And The Translation Process: How Website Translation Cost Is Kept Down

Before your website can be localized, a Translation Style Guide and Glossary will need to be created. These services are charged per hour. This entails:

• A Style Guide must be created for each target language and lists rules for writing style, voice, structure, and preferred spelling. While preferential, the style guide also ensures that the brand voice is maintained in each language and buyer expectations are met.
• Similarly, the glossary is designed to meet buyer expectations. The glossary includes the key terminology that defines the brand and its approved translations.

The actual Translation Process comprises Translation, Editing, and Proofreading (TEP), aimed at producing linguistic and culture-savvy content your multilingual audience will respond to. These services are charged a per word rate. Of course, the per-word price may differ based on the language pairs involved.

Both of these guides will also help in saving time and costs, and the rate of the translation service will depend on various factors. But we will focus on what can impact the cost of your website translation services below!

Final Engineering Tweaks And QA

Once the translation has been completed, the content will be reinserted into your platform or system, and an online QA will follow. While this can add quite a bit to the website translation cost, it is a vital part of the process. This QA will be charged at an hourly rate. This includes:

Linguistic QA: 

• Confirming grammar, spelling, numbers, currency conversion, and overall consistency
• Confirm that the content flows naturally with country-specific idioms and phrases applied correctly.
• Checking if the cultural references are appropriate and will cause no offense in the target locale.

Visual QA:

• Possible UI or UX issues will be resolved
• Graphics that are inappropriately positioned will be fixed
• Any untranslated sections identified and translated
• Font issues will be fixed

Functional QA:

• The overall performance of the website will be tested
• Coding issues will be resolved
• Corrupted audio (when applicable) or missing text will be fixed

Possible Additional Services

So, what if your website is more than just text? What if you have videos, graphics, or other multimedia? Then these services will be charged separately. This can refer to voice-over, subtitling, dubbing, or international SEO services.

Pro tip! Learn more about how the costs for voice-over and subtitling services are calculated in our blogs on multilingual voice-over: get in on the action, and, deciphering the cost of your subtitling services.

Contributing Factors To Website Translation Cost

While we have already touched upon some crucial time-and money-saving factors such as quality integrations, a style guide, and glossaries, this is not all. Each website localization project is different, and it will depend on the unique requirements, scope, and languages, and what the eventual price tag will look like. Here is a quick rundown of the most common factors that influence the price for your website translation services:

• Depending on the scale and mission of your website scale might need transcreation services. Transcreation refers to the process of combining a translation with targeted messaging. Here, extra attention will need to be paid to cultural correctness and international marketing, meaning it is also a service that can cost a pretty penny. So before you opt for transcreation, make sure you need transcreation services to achieve your content goals.
• The CAT Tool is not only equipped to save time, but it can also impact website translation cost. If you need regular translations to be extracted from and reinserted into your website, you will benefit from Continuous Translation and a Translation Memory (TM). A TM is a database that gets built up over time and ensures you never pay for the same translation twice. It is part of an effective terminology management strategy that boosts consistency and efficiency significantly.
• There are other translation tools that can be utilized that can influence website translation cost. For exmaple, some web pages may benefit from Machine Translation (MT), especially when translating into multiple languages. Note that not every content type will benefit from MT. For content where a higher level of engagement is needed, such as marketing content, you will need to hire a professional, human translator. But no worries, the best translation agencies can advice you on the best way to go.
• Finally, the language pair and subject matter will also greatly influence website translation cost. Some languages will run up a higher bill than others. This is because of the complexity of the language, and the availability of qualified professionals. Translating English to Spanish, for example, will be less complicated than translating German to Japanese. The same can be said for the subject matter. A seasoned LSP will only assign subject matter specialists to the translation project. This means that if your niche is rather unique or concrete, the pool of translations can be more shallow and finding the perfect match will be a challenge.