Website Translation Cost: Machine Translation Plugin, In-House or Professional?
Website translation cost depends less on the price per word than on four things: how many words really need translating once repetitions are removed, how often the site changes, how many languages you add, and how cleanly the content leaves your CMS. A plugin is cheap for low-risk pages; legal, product and campaign pages need people. DEMA Solutions translates websites from CMS exports and keeps every update in sync.
Who this guide is for
This guide is for the people who have been asked to “make the website work in German, French and Spanish by the next launch”: marketing managers, e-commerce managers, digital managers and the web teams who support them, in B2B and B2C companies that sell across Europe.
Their questions are practical. Is an automatic translation plugin good enough, or will it damage the brand? Can a colleague who speaks the language do it? Why do two quotes for the same site look so different? How do we get the text out of the CMS and back in without breaking anything? And how do we stop the translated versions from falling behind the source? The sections below answer each in turn.
The three ways to translate a website
There are three realistic options, and most companies end up combining them. The choice is less about which is best in general and more about which content deserves which treatment.
Automatic translation plugins and machine translation. Many CMS and shop systems offer plugins that send every page through a machine translation engine, either on the fly or once, and publish the result. Engines such as DeepL now produce fluent output for many language pairs, and for a large site the plugin route is fast and inexpensive. The limits appear in the details. The engine does not know your product names, your approved terminology or your tone of voice, it translates each string without seeing the page it sits on, and nobody checks the result before customers read it. Some plugins translate on display and never store the text, which makes it impossible to review or correct individual sentences.
Bilingual staff. A sales manager from Munich or a colleague in the Lyon subsidiary knows the market and the product, which is valuable. The cost is hidden rather than low: translation competes with their real job, deadlines slip, quality depends on one person’s time and writing skill, and nothing is stored for reuse. When that person leaves, the knowledge of how the brand sounds in their language leaves with them. Bilingual colleagues are far more useful as reviewers of key pages and approvers of terminology than as translators of the whole site.
Professional translation and localisation. A professional provider works from an export of your content, uses native linguists for each market, applies your glossary and style guide, revises the work and delivers files ready to upload. Localisation goes beyond translation: dates, units, currencies, phone formats, legal references, examples and calls to action are adapted to the market. The price per word is higher than a plugin, but the work is reviewed, stored in a translation memory you can reuse, and repeated text is not paid for twice. Our website translation services follow exactly this model.
Quality and brand risks of automatic translation
Machine translation is not the risk in itself. Publishing it unchecked is. The most frequent problems are predictable, and each has a cost that does not show up on the plugin invoice.
Terminology is the first. A machine engine may translate your product line name, translate a feature name in three different ways across three pages, or render a technical term with a generic word your buyers would never search for or use. Tone is the second: an engine has no idea whether your brand addresses customers formally or informally, and it may switch between the two on the same page. In German and Italian, that difference is immediately visible to readers.
The third risk is context. Buttons, menu items and form labels are short strings without a sentence around them. “Order” can be a noun or a verb, “Free” can mean without charge or available, and the engine guesses. Errors in microcopy are small but they sit exactly where customers act, in checkout, sign-up and contact forms. The fourth is persuasion. Headlines, claims and calls to action that work in the source language often fall flat when translated literally, because they rely on rhythm, cultural reference or wordplay. These are the lines that most need a native copywriter, or full transcreation, which is part of our marketing translation and transcreation work.
None of this means machine translation has no place. It means it should run on your terminology and be checked by a person wherever the text carries risk.
Legal pages, product data and e-commerce content
Not every page carries the same risk, and a sensible budget reflects that.
Legal and compliance pages. Terms and conditions, privacy notices, cookie information, returns and warranty policies and the legal notice are written by lawyers for a specific legal system. Translating them word for word does not make them valid in another country, and machine translating them is a liability. EU consumer law allows Member States to set language requirements for the contractual information given to consumers, and data protection rules require privacy information to be clear and understandable to the person reading it. The practical approach is to have your legal advisers confirm which texts must be adapted for each market, and then have those texts translated by legal specialists and checked by counsel before they go live. Our article on translating contracts and terms and conditions explains which language version prevails and why a lawyer’s review should close the process.
Product data. Product names, specifications, dimensions, materials, care instructions and safety information must be exactly right and consistent with your packaging, manuals and catalogues. This content is highly repetitive, which makes it ideal for translation memory and, on large catalogues, for machine translation with post-editing. Units and decimal separators deserve particular care: a product dimension that changes from 1.5 to 15 in a reformatting step is a returned order.
E-commerce content. An online shop multiplies everything: category texts, filters and attributes, size guides, delivery and payment information, transactional emails, error messages and the checkout itself. Much of this lives outside the page editor, in product databases, theme files or email templates, and is easily forgotten in the first quote. A complete inventory of where shop text lives is the single most useful step before asking for prices. An online shop selling to consumers in the EU may also have to meet the European Accessibility Act requirements, which reach product pages, the checkout and the documents customers download.
Campaign and brand pages. The homepage, landing pages and key sales pages are read by every prospect and carry the brand. They are a small share of the word count and the largest share of the impression, so they deserve native copywriting review or transcreation even when the rest of the site is post-edited.
How a CMS export works (XLIFF, CSV and other formats)
Professional website translation should not involve anyone copying text from a browser into a spreadsheet. Most modern CMS and shop systems, directly or through a multilingual extension, can export translatable content as files, and the translated files are then imported back into the language versions of the same pages.
XLIFF is the standard exchange format for translation. It is an XML file that holds each source segment with an empty target next to it, plus identifiers that tell the CMS exactly where each translation belongs when it comes back. Because the code, layout and structure stay in the CMS, the translator works only on text and cannot break the design. CSV and spreadsheet exports are common for product data and shop systems: one row per product or string, one column per field, with the target language added in new columns. JSON and other resource files are typical for single-page applications and app interfaces, and HTML files are sometimes used for static sites.
A few details decide whether import goes smoothly. The export should include page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text and URL slugs, not just body text, because translated pages need translated titles and descriptions and the correct hreflang links between language versions. Shortcodes, variables and placeholders must be protected so they are not translated. Text embedded in images, sliders or PDFs needs a separate route. And someone on your side should run a test export and import of two or three pages before the full project, which reveals missing fields early. DEMA delivers files in your CMS export format, such as XLIFF, HTML, JSON or CSV, ready for your web team to upload.
Keeping updates in sync
The first translation is a project. Everything after it is a process, and that is where most multilingual sites go wrong: products launch, prices change, landing pages are rewritten, and the translated versions stay where they were. Six months later, the German site describes a product range that no longer exists.
Three habits keep language versions aligned. First, decide who triggers translation: ideally, publishing or changing a page in the source language automatically flags the language versions as outdated, which many multilingual CMS extensions can do. Second, send updates in regular batches, weekly or monthly depending on how often you publish, rather than sentence by sentence by email. Third, export only what changed. A good export sends new and modified segments, with unchanged text already matched against your memory, so you never pay for the whole page again because one paragraph moved.
Translation memory and glossary for recurring updates
Two assets make the difference between a website that gets cheaper to maintain and one that costs the same every time.
A translation memory stores every approved source and target sentence pair. When content is exported again, every sentence that was already translated is recognised and reused, and sentences that are similar to earlier ones are offered to the translator as a starting point. On a website, where navigation, footers, product attributes, delivery information and calls to action repeat on hundreds of pages, this leverage is large. The memory should belong to you and be delivered in a portable format, so you can change provider without starting again; that is the reasoning behind owning your translation memory. If you already have translations from an earlier project but no memory, aligning existing translations into a memory recovers that work.
A glossary records your approved terms in every language: product names that stay in English, feature names, technical terms and words you never want used. It is what keeps the website consistent with your catalogue, packaging and manuals, and it is the single best way to make machine translation behave. Building one with your product and marketing teams takes a short effort up front, and our guide to keeping terminology consistent across translators and suppliers explains how to start, while dedicated terminology management takes care of it for larger ranges. A short translation style guide does the same for tone: formal or informal address, how to handle English loanwords, and how calls to action should sound in each market.
What drives website translation cost
So, how much does it cost to translate a website? Any honest answer starts with the factors, because a price per word on its own says very little. Two quotes for the same site can differ widely simply because one provider counted repetitions and the other did not.
Word count, measured properly. The real word count is what is in the export, not what you estimate from the page list. Count body text, metadata, alt text, microcopy, product data and transactional emails. Teams often underestimate by forgetting everything that is not in the main page editor.
Repetitions and matches. Websites are extremely repetitive. Text that appears on many pages, or that matches an earlier translation in your memory, should be charged at a reduced rate or not at all, depending on the agreement. As an illustration, a shop with 40,000 words in its export might contain only 22,000 unique words once repeated attributes and boilerplate are removed, and a second wave of updates a few months later might contain 3,000 new words and 5,000 that are partly matched. Ask every provider for an analysis that shows these categories separately.
Updates and frequency. A site that changes weekly needs a process, not a series of one-off projects. Regular small batches with memory leverage cost far less over a year than rare large re-translations, and they keep the language versions accurate.
Number of languages. Cost scales almost linearly with languages, so prioritise. Start with the markets that bring revenue, translate the full site there, and consider a reduced site, perhaps product pages, contact and legal pages, for markets you are still testing.
Level of treatment. Machine translation with full post-editing, human translation with revision, and transcreation of headlines are three different services at three different price levels. Mapping each content type to the right one is the main lever for website localization cost.
Technical integration. A clean export and import is cheap. Copying text from a live site, extracting strings from theme files, handling text in images, or rebuilding content that the CMS cannot export all add hours that have nothing to do with translation. Investing a little web development time in a proper export route usually pays for itself on the first update.
When machine translation with post-editing makes sense
For large volumes of descriptive, low-risk text, such as product attributes, long catalogue descriptions, knowledge-base articles or archived blog posts, machine translation with human post-editing is often the right balance between speed and cost. The engine produces a draft that respects your glossary, and a qualified linguist corrects it to publishable quality.
It is less suitable for short, high-visibility text, such as headlines, slogans, calls to action and emotional brand copy, and it is not appropriate for legal texts. Our page on machine translation with post-editing explains how the service is set up, and the article on when post-editing is good enough discusses where the line falls.
How to brief a website translation provider
A good brief saves money twice: in the quote, because the provider prices what you actually need, and in the project, because fewer questions come back. Website translation best practices start here. Before you request quotes, prepare the following:
- Scope and inventory: which sections, page types and content sources are included (CMS pages, shop products, emails, PDFs, images with text), with a sample export.
- Markets and languages: which countries, which language variants, and the order of priority.
- Treatment per content type: which pages need transcreation, which need human translation and which can be post-edited.
- Reference material: your glossary, style guide, existing translations and any approved catalogue or packaging terminology.
- Technical details: the export format your CMS produces, who imports the files, and how updates will be flagged.
- Review and approval: who in each market reviews key pages, and how much time they have.
- Update rhythm: how often content changes and how you want updates delivered.
Then compare the answers, not only the prices. Ask each provider how they count repetitions and memory matches and whether the analysis will be shared with you, whether the translation memory and glossary belong to you and in which format you receive them, how many people work on each text and whether a second linguist revises it, and whether they work in your export format without manual copying. Our article on how to check a supplier’s quality before you hire them lists further questions worth asking.
How DEMA Solutions handles website translation
We translate and localise the words on your website: page copy, headings, microcopy, SEO metadata, URLs and image alt text. Native linguists for each target market adapt tone, references, units and formats; native copywriters can review key pages for clarity and persuasiveness; and headlines, slogans and campaign claims can be transcreated, with several options and back-translation. Design and code stay with your web team, and we deliver files in your CMS export format, such as XLIFF, HTML, JSON or CSV, ready to upload.
The process is ISO 17100 certified, with a second qualified linguist revising every translation, as described on our quality page. Your translation memory and glossary are built from the first project, belong to you and are delivered in portable formats, so every future update is faster and more consistent, and leverage reporting shows how much of each update is reused. Our teams in Italy, Serbia and Spain work with linguists in every market you sell to.
Where TUBE fits
For companies whose website changes every week, TUBE keeps each update under your control. Your glossary and translation memory control machine translation, every approved translation goes into a memory you own and can export, and leverage reporting shows how much of each update comes from text you have already approved.
Frequently asked questions
It depends on the number of unique words after repetitions are removed, the number of languages, the level of treatment for each content type (post-editing, translation with revision or transcreation) and how easily content can be exported from your CMS. Ask for a word count analysis of a real export rather than a quote based on page numbers.
For internal pages, archives or a first test of a market, it can be. For the homepage, product and campaign pages, checkout and legal texts, unreviewed machine translation risks wrong terminology, inconsistent tone and errors where customers act. Many companies combine machine translation for low-risk content with human translation for key pages.
They can, but the hidden cost in time and consistency is usually high and nothing is stored for reuse. Bilingual colleagues are most valuable as reviewers of key pages and approvers of terminology.
Whatever your CMS or shop system exports cleanly: XLIFF is the standard for translation, CSV is common for product data, and JSON or HTML for some sites. Run a test export and import of a few pages first, and include metadata and alt text.
Terms, privacy notices and returns policies should be adapted to each market by legal advisers and translated by legal specialists, not machine translated. Some countries set language requirements for consumer information, so check with counsel for every market.
Flag changed pages automatically in the CMS, send updates in regular batches, export only new and modified content, and use a translation memory so unchanged text is reused instead of paid for again.
Translation converts the text. Localisation also adapts dates, units, currencies, formats, examples, legal references and calls to action to the target market so the site reads as if it were written there.
Plan your multilingual website
If you are preparing a website or online shop for new markets, send us a sample export and tell us which languages you need. We will analyse the real word count, show you where repetitions and existing translations reduce the effort, and propose the right treatment for each part of the site.
How can we help?
Tell us what you need and we’ll get back to you with the solutions.