French translation rates explained: what to budget in 2026

French is one of the cheapest major languages to translate per word, and one of the easiest to overpay for.

The per-word rate is ordinary. What moves the bill is everything around it: which French you buy, whether a sworn stamp is required, how much longer the French text runs than your English source, and above all how many of your words actually deserve a professional.

What French actually costs per word

Start with the best data that exists for the French market. The Société française des traducteurs (SFT) surveyed 1,204 translators in 2022 and collected 2,723 per-word rates. English to French was the largest pair in the sample, with 1,102 rates.

Source: SFT, Rapport de l’enquête 2022 sur les pratiques professionnelles en traduction, annex tables on per-word rates.

Read the gap between the two client rows carefully. An agency pays its French translator a median of 0.08 € per word, then sells the same word to you. The difference funds project management, review, and the agency’s margin.

US rate cards land in the same neighbourhood once you cross the currency. GTS lists English to French at $0.14 per word, identical to German and well above the $0.08 it charges for Spanish. Tomedes advertises French from $0.11 per word. Broad US guidance puts professional human translation at $0.15 to $0.30 per word, and The Translation Company quotes $0.09 to $0.40 across all languages, with common pairs such as French between $0.10 and $0.22.

So the honest planning range for professional English to French translation is 0.08 to 0.15 € per word in France, and roughly $0.11 to $0.22 on US rate cards. Anything above that is buying something specific: a specialism, a certification, or speed. Ask which.

Where the French bill actually grows

The base rate is the smallest surprise in a French project. These four items are the larger ones.

Rush and other surcharges. Half of the SFT respondents apply surcharges. Urgent work carries an average 28% premium, night work 38%, and the average across all surcharge types is about 26%. A Friday-afternoon request for Monday morning is not billed at the rate card.

Minimum fees. Among translators who apply one, the SFT survey puts the average minimum invoice at 39 €. A 30-word update costs the same as a 300-word one, which is why small, frequent changes are the most expensive words you will ever buy.

Certification. A sworn translation (traduction assermentée) is a regulated product in France, produced by a translator registered with a court of appeal, and it is billed per page rather than per word because each page carries a stamp. Legal Translation publishes rates from 20 € per page for standard administrative, academic, and legal documents. In the SFT survey, certified work averages 0.15 € per word, level with the highest client category measured. You need it for court filings, diplomas, civil status records, and some public tenders. You do not need it for a product catalogue, and a vendor who bundles it in is padding the quote.

Text expansion. French runs longer than English. Translation guides put the expansion at 15 to 30%, and The Translation Company narrows it to 20 to 25% for French, Spanish, and Portuguese. That matters in two places, and the second is the one people miss.

French runs long, and that changes the arithmetic

The first place text expansion bites is your interface. The W3C’s guidance on text size in translation cites IBM data showing that short strings expand far more than long ones: a source string under ten characters can grow by 200 to 300%, while text over seventy characters grows by around 30%. Its example is the English word “views” becoming “consultations” in French, 2.6 times the length. Buttons, menu labels, and table headers are where French breaks a layout, not paragraphs.

The second place is your invoice, and it only appears when French is the source. Most rate cards bill per source word. If your master content is written in French and you are translating it into English, German, and Spanish, the word count you pay for is the French one, which is 15 to 30% higher than the English equivalent would have been. A 100,000-word French help centre is not a 100,000-word English help centre with accents. Count the words in the file you are actually sending before you multiply by the rate.

AI Glot bills the same way, one credit per source word in Standard mode, so the same rule applies there: the plan shows you the word count of the file before anything is spent, and that is the number to check.

Which French are you buying?

French is not one target either, and this is the decision that separates a well-priced project from an expensive re-do.

French for France is the default that most vendors mean when they say “French”. It also serves Belgium and Switzerland for almost all business content. Both countries have their own vocabulary (septante for seventy in Belgium and Switzerland, a handful of administrative terms, different names for meals), but standard written French from France reads as normal to a Belgian or Swiss customer. For a catalogue, a help centre, or an app, one French-for-France pass covers the three markets. Reserve a Belgian or Swiss review for legal text and for pricing pages where a specific local term matters.

Canadian French is a different product, and agencies price it that way. On the same GTS rate card, English to French Canadian costs $0.17 per word against $0.14 for French for France, and GTS states plainly that “French translations that are intended for use in Europe will not be suitable for use in Canada”. The differences are real: vocabulary that stayed close to 17th-century French, a different set of anglicisms, and legal and administrative terminology shaped by Quebec’s own institutions.

There is a cheaper path than two full translations. GTS lists French to French Canadian adaptation at $0.09 per word, about two thirds of a fresh translation. If you already have a French-for-France version, adapting it for Quebec costs less than translating the English again, and it keeps the two variants consistent with each other.

The practical rule:

1. One variant serves all markets when the content is functional: product specifications, help articles, interface strings, subtitles. Buy French for France.
2. Two variants are worth paying for when the content is judged on tone: marketing pages, campaign copy, customer support scripts aimed at Quebec. Buy French for France, then adapt for Canada.
3. Legal text is per jurisdiction regardless. A Quebec contract is not a Paris contract with different spelling.

Whichever you choose, tell AI Glot in the instruction. “Translate into French for Quebec” and “translate into French for France” produce different output, and a workspace glossary fixes the terms that must not drift between the two (the product name, the plan names, the word your product uses for “account”).

What this costs for a catalogue, a blog, or an app

Most pricing guides assume you are translating a document. If your French content is a spreadsheet export, a set of app strings, or a blog archive, the volume changes the conversation entirely.

Consider a product catalogue at roughly 25 words per row, covering a title and a short description.

AI Glot credit costs use the published pack rates: one credit equals one translated word in Standard mode, the Launch pack is 50,000 words for 50 €, and Orbit is 250,000 for 200 €. Lite mode covers about three times more words for the same credits.

The professional column is not a criticism of professionals. It is the reason nobody translates a 10,000-row catalogue by hand, and the same arithmetic applies to any spreadsheet, feed, or string table.

Machine translation APIs make the same point from the other side. Google Cloud Translation charges $20 per million characters after a free 500,000 characters a month, and the rate is identical for French and every other language. At the API level French has no premium at all. The premium is a review and publishing premium, and it appears the moment output has to be checked, laid out, and imported back into a real system.

Volume and importance are not the same thing

Here is the framing that makes a French budget work, and it is the one we give every customer who asks.

Your homepage, your store page, and a handful of interface keys are a tiny share of your words and roughly 80% of what matters. Your blog archive, your catalogue, your help centre, and your app strings across eight languages are almost all of your words and the rest of what matters. Volume and importance are not correlated, and pricing everything at one rate ignores that.

So the recommendation writes itself.

Pay a professional for the small, critical set. A homepage is a few hundred words. At 0.14 € per word, a native French expert for it costs less than a day of your own time, and it is the page a French buyer judges you on. Do the same for contracts, for anything that needs a sworn stamp, and for the dozen interface strings that appear on every screen. Our guide to translating a website into French covers how to pick those pages.

Run the volume through AI Glot. Thousands of catalogue rows, a blog archive, a help centre, and app strings in several languages are where the hours and the money actually go, and no budget survives paying 0.14 € per word for them. Upload the file, say what you need in one sentence (“translate the description and the SEO title, leave the handle alone”), read the plan, and approve it. Standard mode for content customers read closely, Lite for the long tail.

Then choose your own ceiling. Some teams push the output straight live. Others add a French reviewer on the top 100 products, or on the Quebec variant only, or on the pricing page and nothing else. Both are correct. Review is a decision about risk on content that is already usable, and the AI versus human tradeoff looks very different once the per-word rate only applies to the words that earn it.

How to control the cost

Four decisions do most of the work.

Count the words in the source file you are actually sending. If that file is French, it is 15 to 30% longer than you think. Get the number before you accept a per-word quote.

Decide the variant before the first word is translated. French for France for functional content across France, Belgium, and Switzerland. A Canadian adaptation on top for tone-sensitive Quebec content. Legal text per jurisdiction. Retro-fitting a variant is a second full job.

Build a glossary before the first batch. Product names, plan names, feature terms, and the words you refuse to translate belong in a workspace glossary, so the twentieth file agrees with the first. A brand glossary is also how you keep the French-for-France and Canadian versions using the same product vocabulary.

Buy certification only where a court or a ministry will ask for it. It is per page, it is regulated, and it is the wrong product for a catalogue.

The bottom line

Budget French at 0.08 to 0.15 € per word for professional work in France, or around $0.14 on a US rate card, and treat that as an ordinary price for an ordinary language pair. Then budget separately for the things that make French projects expensive: rush surcharges near 28%, a per-page sworn stamp where the law requires it, a second variant for Quebec, and a source word count that runs long when French is the original.

Above all, do not pay the professional rate for the volume. Pay it for the homepage, the contract, and the twenty strings on every screen, and let the catalogue, the archive, and the app strings run through an engine built for the job.

All figures in this article were checked against their sources on 2026-09-08. Rates are shown in the currency each source publishes and are not converted, because the decision they inform does not change with the exchange rate.

Ready to price your own French project? Try AI Glot with 10,000 free credits and translate a real file into French for France or Quebec, with a plan you approve before anything is spent. The credit pricing is on the same page as the plan.