Website Translation Cost: What Drives It

Ask three agencies to quote a 40-page website and you'll get three different structures: a flat "site package," a per-word estimate, a per-hour development-adjacent quote. None of them are wrong, but they're not comparable to each other, which is exactly why website translation cost feels opaque from the buyer's side. It isn't. It's built from a small number of variables, and once you know them a quote stops looking like a black box.

Word count is the base, but it's not the whole story

Every serious quote starts with source word count, because that's the one variable that scales linearly with translator time. A 12,000-word site costs roughly twice what a 6,000-word site costs, all else equal. Where "all else equal" breaks down is everything downstream of that number: how the content is extracted, how much of it repeats, and whether the job is a one-off or an ongoing relationship.

How you hand the content over changes the price

A CMS export with clean, isolated strings (WordPress, Webflow, a headless CMS with a translation API) is the cheapest scenario: the translator gets exactly the text that needs translating, nothing more, nothing less. A PDF export of rendered pages or a pile of screenshots is the most expensive, because someone has to manually extract every string, guess at character limits for buttons and menus, and reconstruct context that the file format threw away. Between those two extremes sits the common case: a spreadsheet or JSON/XLIFF file someone on your team exported by hand. That's workable, but it shifts real time — and therefore cost — onto whoever prepares and re-imports it.

If your site runs on a CMS with any kind of export function, use it. It routinely cuts turnaround by days and avoids the string-by-string copy-paste errors that come from working off screenshots.

One-off translation vs. an ongoing localization workflow

A single homepage-plus-key-pages translation is priced once and delivered once. A site that publishes new content weekly — a blog, a changing product catalog, release notes — needs a different arrangement: an ongoing per-word rate with a defined turnaround SLA, so new content ships translated within a set window instead of piling up until someone remembers to order a batch. The per-word rate itself doesn't usually change between the two models; what changes is the workflow around it, and that's worth agreeing on explicitly before the first project, not after the third rushed request.

Translation memory is where repeat cost actually goes down

Website copy repeats itself more than people expect: navigation labels, footer legal text, product-template boilerplate, "Add to cart" buttons appearing on hundreds of product pages. A translation memory (TM) tool detects these exact and near-exact repeats and lets a vendor bill the effective word count rather than the raw one — a repeated string gets translated once and reused, not re-billed every time it appears. This matters most on ecommerce and SaaS sites with a lot of templated content, and it's cumulative: the more content you translate through the same TM over time, the more future updates benefit from matches against everything that came before.

A worked example

Say a mid-size ecommerce site has 12,000 raw source words across the homepage, category pages, and 40 product pages that share a common template (spec table headers, shipping disclaimer, size-guide link). A TM analysis on content like this typically finds 25–30% of that raw count is exact or near-exact repetition. At our published localization rate of €0.11 per word, the difference looks like this:

• No TM discount, full raw count: 12,000 words × €0.11 = €1,320
• With TM applied to ~28% repetition: effective billable count drops to roughly 8,600 words × €0.11 = €946

That's a real ~28% saving on this one job, and it compounds: the second language pass for the same site starts from the same TM, so future updates (a new product line, a seasonal page) draw on matches from everything already translated. This is also why "per project" flat quotes are hard to compare fairly — they don't tell you whether TM savings were already factored in or quietly kept as margin.

What to ask a vendor before you accept a quote

• Is the rate per source word, and does it already reflect TM matches, or is that a separate line item? Some vendors quote raw word count and apply the discount later; ask which you're looking at.
• How is the content being extracted, and who's responsible for re-importing it? If that's on your team, budget the engineering time, not just the translation line.
• What happens to formatting and length constraints? German and Finnish routinely run 20–35% longer than English; a button label that fits in English can overflow in German if no one flags the character limit up front.
• Is this a one-off or does it need an ongoing SLA? Get that in writing if you're publishing new content regularly — it changes what "done" means.

Getting a real number

The fastest way to get an accurate figure is to send the actual export — CMS file, spreadsheet, or URLs — rather than describe the site in general terms; word count and repetition are things we measure, not estimate from a page count. See the localization service page for what's included, or read website translation vs. localization first if you're not yet sure which one your project needs. Request a localization quote and you'll get an instant estimate followed by a human-confirmed fixed price within about two business hours, with nothing charged until you approve it.