All translation prices in USD. See samples below.

How Do We Keep Translation Affordable?

how much does translation cost

Many large translation companies rely on an array of smaller companies to actually deliver the work. The longer this chain goes on, the higher your price, and the harder it is to verify quality and accountability.

Meridian works directly with linguists. Period. Our linguists are vetted and tested, but are all independent contractors, so you pay ONLY for the services that you ordered. NOT the overhead of a dozen other companies.

Finally, we leverage the latest AI and translation technology to help our linguists do their job (not replace them). These technologies speed up the translation process by translating duplicated text, spotted consistency errors, and arranging the formatting to match the source.

Translation of Text

Text translations are charged per word, and pricing varies across language and subject matter.

An English page usually has about 200-300 words, and don’t worry if your document is a PDF – we can provide word counting services.

If your project is high-volume, we are happy to offer computer-assisted translation services which search for duplication in order to lower the overall cost of your project.

Interpretation (speech)

Our interpreters usually charge by the hour or by the day. They are carefully selected from a pool of conference-ready interpreters, many of whom have interpreted for the United Nations, heads of state, and celebrities.

We never proceed with work until you have confirmed our quote, and we won’t surprise you with extra fees. Just send us your documents, and we’ll get you a customized quote within 12 hours!

Sample

$45
  • Translation of a 1-Page Marriage Certificate

Pricing examples for translation

Sample

$25
  • 3 Pages of Spanish E-mails into English

Sample

$45
  • 4 pages of a Korean to English Instruction Manual

Sample

$250
  • 5 Pages of a French to English Legal Contract

Sample

$800
  • Translation of a Korean E-Commerce Website into Spanish

Sample

$5,000
  • 40 pages of English patents into Chinese, rush turnaround, split between a team of translators across time zones with editors to harmonize terminology

Are these translation prices beyond your budget?

Translation is a complex and highly nuanced process that machines have yet to fully master, and we pay our linguists competitive rates in order to encourage their best work and fastest turnaround.

However, in the following situations, machine translation may be appropriate. For example:

  1. You only need to know the gist of a document
  2. You only need to identify certain keywords among a large number of documents
  3. You have in-house linguists who can edit machine translation
  4. You need to identify relevant text before having it translated at human translation rates

In these cases, we can offer premium machine translation services tailored to the language pair you need. Our engines use the latest in neural and statistical machine translation, and often cost half of what our human translation costs.

If cost is still prohibitive, we recommend you use these free machine translation tools:

DeepL (highest quality machine translation, but currently only for European languages and European customers)

GoogleTranslate (varying quality but improving steadily, best results with European languages)

BaiduTranslate (best results with Chinese and other Asian languages)

NaverTranslate (best results with Korean and other Asian languages)

YandexTranslate (best results with Russian and Slavic languages)