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 2,740 per-word rates. English is the source language for nearly one rate in two, and French is the main target language.
| Average per-word rate, all language pairs | Average |
|---|---|
| All clients combined | 0.13 € |
| Billed directly to a company | 0.15 € |
| Billed to a translation agency | 0.11 € |
| Certified translation | 0.15 € |
Source: SFT, Rapport de l’enquête 2022 sur les pratiques professionnelles en traduction, per-word rates by client type. These are averages across every language pair in the survey, not English to French alone, and the report does not break out an English to French median.
Read the gap between the two client rows carefully. An agency pays its translators 0.11 € per word on average, against 0.15 € when a translator bills a company directly. Whatever an agency then charges you on top funds project management, review, and its 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 $0.09 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.
So the honest planning range for professional English to French translation is around 0.11 to 0.15 € per word in France, and from $0.11 to $0.14 on the US rate cards above. 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: different vocabulary, 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:
- One variant serves all markets when the content is functional: product specifications, help articles, interface strings, subtitles. Buy French for France.
- 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.
- 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 French terms and conditions cost, with and without the surcharges
Pricing guides usually assume one document. A French-market webshop has a bundle instead: terms of sale (CGV), privacy policy, returns and shipping conditions, cookie policy, and legal notice (mentions légales). The scenarios below are illustrations with assumed sizes, priced with the article’s own figures: the SFT direct-client mean of 0.15 € per word, and the 28% urgent premium from the surcharge section above.
| Scenario | Words (assumed) | Professional at 0.15 € | Same, rushed (+28%) | AI Glot credits (Standard) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One set of terms of sale | 4,000 | 600 € | 768 € | 4,000 credits, inside the free 5,000-word sample |
| Full legal bundle for one store | 15,000 | 2,250 € | 2,880 € | 15,000 credits, 15 € bought once |
| Marketplace with seller terms per category | 120,000 | 18,000 € | 23,040 € | 120,000 credits, ~105 € bought once |
The arithmetic is words times 0.15 €, then times 1.28 for the rushed column (2,250 × 1.28 = 2,880). The SFT means cover every language pair, so treat the professional columns as an order of magnitude for English to French, not a quote. Using the agency mean of 0.11 € instead, the terms of sale come to 440 €.
AI Glot credit costs use the published one-time prices: one credit is one source word in Standard mode, and you can buy any amount from 10,000 credits for 10 €, with volume discounts from 5% at 50,000 credits up to 65% at 5,000,000. The figures in the last column are what that exact amount costs when bought once (100,000 credits are 90 €, 250,000 are 200 €), so there is no pack to round up to. A Starter or Pro plan costs less per credit than a one-time purchase. Lite mode stretches the same credits about three times further.
Two caveats keep this honest. First, a machine draft of a contract is a draft: a French lawyer’s review of the bundle is a separate cost the table does not include, and for a court filing you would need a sworn translation on top. Second, the minimum invoice works the other way at small sizes: amending a 200-word clause is 30 € by the word and 39 € by the SFT minimum, which is why legal updates are cheaper batched than sent one at a time.
The stack matters more than the base rate. On the human side, a night rate of 38% and an urgent rate of 28% sit on top of 0.15 €. A machine has no night shift: Google Cloud Translation lists a flat $20 per million characters, with the first 500,000 characters each month free, at any hour and on any deadline. What you actually pay for with AI Glot is the check on the output and the import back into your store, and that is a choice you make per document.
Where to spend the professional rate
Your homepage, your checkout page, and the dozen interface strings on every screen are few words carrying most of your reputation, while the legal bundle, catalogue, and help centre are most of the words with less risk per string. Pay a native French expert for the first group and let the engine take the second, then add review only where a mistake would cost you. Our guide to translating a website into French shows how to pick those pages, and the AI versus human tradeoff looks different once the per-word rate applies only to the words that earn it.
- Homepage and store page
- Contracts and sworn documents
- A handful of UI keys
- Catalogue and product feed
- Blog archive and help centre
- App strings, every locale
- Native review on the top products
- French for France, then a Quebec pass
- Publish the rest as it comes
Questions to ask before you accept a French quote
A French quote is a stack of line items, so ask for each one in writing.
What are the surcharges, and when do they apply? Half of the SFT respondents apply them. Get the urgent and night rates in the quote, not in the invoice.
What is the minimum invoice? The survey average is 39 €. If you will send small updates often, negotiate a monthly batch instead.
Which French, and who adapts it? France, Belgium, and Switzerland can share one pass. Quebec is a separate line, priced either as a new translation or as an adaptation of the France version. Whichever you choose, put it in the AI Glot instruction (“translate into French for Quebec”) and let a brand glossary keep product and plan names identical in both versions.
Is the sworn stamp really required? Only a court, a ministry, or a civil registry asks for it. It is billed per page, and it is the wrong product for a catalogue or a terms page you publish on your own site.
The market case for bothering
The OIF’s 2026 edition of La langue française dans le monde counts 396 million French speakers worldwide, up from 321 million in 2022. They are not all fluent in English. Eurostat reports that in 2022, 25.3% of EU adults aged 25 to 64 knew no foreign language, and only 28% of those who knew at least one said they were proficient in their strongest. A French reader who has to switch to English is a reader you make work.
The buying side is a large market too. Nimdzi estimates the language industry at USD 72.6 billion in 2025, projected at USD 73.4 billion in 2026. Translation is an ordinary line item, and your French quote should read like one: a word count, a unit price, what the price includes, and the turnaround.
The bottom line
Budget French at around 0.11 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 terms of sale, 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, and the SFT, Tomedes and The Translation Company figures were re-read on 2026-09-29. Euro and dollar rates are left in the currency each source publishes, since the French sources quote in euros and the rate cards above quote in dollars, and mixing them would add an exchange-rate guess to figures that are already averages.
Got a set of terms or a store to bring to French customers? Sign up for AI Glot, upload it and get your first 5,000 words free, say whether it is for France or Quebec, and read the word count in the plan before you approve anything.