Freelance Translator Rate Calculator

What actually moves a translator's rate

A few things drive most of the difference. Your language pair matters, and so does how scarce it is: English>Spanish and English>French are crowded, so prices get squeezed, while pairs like English>Japanese, English>Nordic languages, or anything involving Icelandic, Finnish, or Korean cost more because fewer qualified people exist. Specialization matters too. A subject-matter expert in legal, medical, patent, financial, or pharma translation charges two to three times what a generalist does for the same word count, because a mistranslated dosage or contract clause carries real liability. There's also who the client is. Agencies (LSPs) supply steady volume but negotiate hard and often impose CAT-tool match grids. Direct clients, such as law firms, device manufacturers, publishers, and SaaS companies localizing their product, routinely pay 1.5–3x agency rates. And certified or sworn status and turnaround play a part. Certified documents for immigration or court, and real same-day rush work, both justify a surcharge.

Which pricing model fits

Per-word pricing (usually per source word, so the count is fixed before you start) is still the default and the easiest to quote to agencies. The problem is that the faster and more fluent you get, the less you earn per hour for the same quality, so run your per-word rate back through an hourly check. Your real throughput might be 400 words an hour on a dense patent and 900 on a simple letter, and the math needs to clear your target hourly rate in both cases. Use per-project or value pricing for transcreation and marketing, where word counts are tiny but the stakes are high, and hourly for revision, editing, proofreading, and MTPE (machine-translation post-editing). A retainer works well for a direct client who sends predictable monthly volume, such as a SaaS product with a rolling release cycle.

The mistakes that cost translators money

The classic one is charging per word for a marketing tagline. Translating a five-word slogan might take two hours of research and a dozen drafts, and it might be worth thousands to the client, but billed per word it earns you cents. Other traps include accepting agency fuzzy-match grids that pay 30–70% for repetitions and near-matches without checking they still hit your hourly floor, taking MTPE work at a flat 60% discount when the AI output is so bad you end up retranslating it, and having no minimum fee, so a 40-word job costs you more in admin than it pays. Set a minimum (many translators use the equivalent of 250–300 words or one hour) and hold to it.

Using this calculator

Enter your target annual income and a realistic number of billable hours. Remember that quoting, invoicing, and CAT-tool cleanup aren't billable. The calculator returns the hourly rate you need, and you can convert that to a per-word figure using your honest words-per-hour for the kind of text you translate. Quote the per-word number to agencies, but keep the underlying hourly floor in view so you can walk away from grids and post-editing offers that dip below it.

Rate calculators for other freelance fields

If you work in a different field, try the web developer, graphic designer, copywriter, virtual assistant, photographer, marketing consultant, bookkeeper, ux designer, social media manager, video editor, illustrator, seo consultant, voice-over artist, business coach, wordpress developer rate calculators, or the general freelance rate calculator.

Once you've set your rate, turn it into fixed quotes with the project quote builder, price ongoing work with the retainer calculator, and set aside tax with the tax set-aside calculator.

Frequently asked questions