Indie authors thinking about bringing their book into another language quickly run into a huge price range. Traditional literary translators typically charge per word or per page and calculate the time needed for a whole manuscript — depending on book length, that can easily add up to several thousand dollars before a single word is translated.
The three common pricing models
Per word. The classic model among professional literary translators. Per-word rates vary widely by language pair and translator experience.
Per standard page. Common in many markets, a standard page is usually around 1,800 characters. For an average novel, that's quickly a few hundred pages.
Flat fee per book. Rare among traditional providers, but exactly the model that AI-powered services like Literaxis make possible — because automation drastically reduces the time cost per word.
What drives the cost up
For human translators, raw working time is the main factor: an 80,000-word novel means several weeks of work for an experienced translator, depending on text complexity. On top of that, editing and proofreading are often billed separately. Wordplay, culturally specific references, and stylistic nuance add further time, because they can't be translated mechanically.
How Literaxis changes the pricing model
Literaxis translates entire books starting at CHF 69 — a one-time payment per book, no subscription. This is possible through a 5-pass AI process: the translation itself, followed by an independent quality check that actively looks for omissions, tense shifts, and meaning errors. Passages where automatic translation reaches its limits — wordplay, culturally specific idioms, lost rhymes — aren't silently smoothed over, they're flagged in the PDF. For every flagged passage, you get three variants to choose from: literal, semantic, or creative.
The result isn't "cheap machine translation" — it's 90–95% publication-ready text, where you decide yourself where your attention as an author is needed, instead of paying extra for every page regardless of whether it was easy or difficult to translate.
Test it for free before deciding
Without an account, you can translate one page (~300 words) for free, once. With a free account, you get 10 pages (~3,000 words) per week — enough to translate a full chapter and check the quality on your own text before committing to a whole book.