How much does it cost to translate a book?

The short answer, for an 80,000-word novel

An 80,000-word novel is roughly 250 to 300 printed pages. The table below converts every price we found into a cost for that length. The per-word and per-book figures come from the providers' own pages; the totals for 80,000 words are our own arithmetic, not a quote from anyone.

The gap between the second and fourth rows is the whole story: a human who reads and corrects every sentence costs hundreds of times more than a machine pass. The rest of this guide explains what sits in between.

Human literary translation: $0.10 to $0.30 per word

Guides aimed at authors quote $0.10 to $0.30 per word for literary translation, which works out to $5,000 to $15,000 for a 50,000-word novel (sources: booktranslator.ai and bookbutchers.com, both read on October 15, 2026). For 80,000 words the same rates give $8,000 to $24,000.

Specialist providers sit in the same area. Protexte, a French agency, lists English-to-French translation from 0.15 euro per word, which is 12,000 euros for 80,000 words. Librinova, a French self-publishing platform, sells a professional translation from French to English at 0.20 euro per word, or 16,000 euros for the same length.

This is what you pay for a translator who interprets the book, not just its sentences. Nothing in the AI price bands below replaces that, and an honest provider should say so.

AI plus human post-editing: $0.03 to $0.12 per word

The middle band is a machine translation that a professional then reads and corrects. Published rates vary a lot:

• TA Ontario, a Canadian translation firm, quotes $0.06 to $0.12 per word for post-editing AI translations, in one to three business days.
• Tradonline, a French agency, sells corrected AI translation from 0.05 euro per word excluding VAT, without any concern for style.
• Taia.io charges 0.06 euro per word for its AI-plus-human hybrid, against $0.006 per word for AI alone.
• Librinova offers AI-assisted translation, reviewed by professionals, at 0.12 euro per word (French to English only).
• Booktranslator.ai cites a range of $0.03 to $0.08 per word for AI plus review.

At 80,000 words, 0.06 euro per word is 4,800 euros and 0.12 euro per word is 9,600 euros. The price depends mostly on how deeply the human reviewer works: light proofreading is cheap, a bilingual revision against the source is not.

AI services built for authors: $99 to $390 per book

A newer group of services sells AI translation of whole manuscripts at a flat price per book, usually with some control over the result. A few examples, as listed on their own pages on October 15, 2026:

• BookLingua: $99 up to 40,000 words, $149 up to 80,000, $199 up to 150,000, per language, with discounts when you add languages. It offers a cultural scan, a translation brief and a glossary, and has a professional translator review selected passages (not the whole book).
• Luman Translation (formerly GlobeScribe): $120 for 60,000 to 80,000 words and $140 for 80,000 to 100,000, with human review as an optional extra at an unpublished price.
• BookTranslate.ai: from $390 per book, priced by character count, with a glossary and a style blueprint.
• Translate A Book: per book, for 20,000 to 200,000 words, 3 to 13 euros (Standard), 7 to 44 euros (Pro) and 35 to 227 euros (Author mode).
• Leanpub TranslateAI: its own pages show contradictory prices, from $49 to $349 per language.

This is the band where glossaries, tone briefs and regional variants appear. Most of these services stop at a handful of European languages and none of them lays out your book for print.

What Librolingua charges

Librolingua sits in the AI-for-authors band and prices by the thousand words of your actual manuscript. The chain behind every level is the same: a style sheet for your book, the translation, review agents, an arbiter agent and automatic checks. The higher levels use more powerful models and more review passes.

The minimum order is 40 euros. If you translate into several languages, multilingual discounts of 7 to 15 percent apply. Paperback layout is priced separately: 0.14 euro per page, with a 29 euro minimum, and 30 percent off when it accompanies a translation.

To be clear about positioning: AI does not equal a great literary translator. What these prices buy is a translation that would not exist otherwise, checked by several automatic passes, that you should still have read by a native speaker before you sell it.

The costs that are not on the translation invoice

Three items regularly surprise authors.

Review. Whatever the translation method, someone who reads the target language should look at the result before publication. Freelance proofreading starts around 0.04 euro per word in France (charlinebrainez.com, October 2026), which is 3,200 euros for 80,000 words if the whole book is proofread. Many authors review only the first chapters, the dialogue and the back cover text.

Layout. A print-ready interior and a valid EPUB are not part of a translation. Market prices run from about 0.15 euro per page for an automated tool (Gutter, minimum 15 euros) to 250 to 700 euros for a French freelance, and Reedsy reports a typical project at around $800.

ISBN and cover. A paperback needs an ISBN per format, and the cover must be recalculated for the new page count because the spine width changes with it.

How to choose

Start from the use of the book, not the price list.

1. Testing a market, or a personal project. A low-cost AI pass is reasonable. Publish an ebook, read the reviews, and invest more only if the book sells.
2. A book you want to stand behind. Pick an AI service that lets you set a glossary, a register and a regional variant, then pay a native reader for a targeted review of dialogue and chapter openings.
3. A flagship title. Budget for a literary translator. No automated pipeline, ours included, should be presented as an equal.

Whichever route you choose, ask for a free sample of about 1,000 words from a chapter of your own book and compare it with the original. Price lists only mean something once you have seen the output.

Prices on this page were read on October 15, 2026 and providers change them often. Check each provider's own page before you decide.

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