The Product Literature Translation Multiverse (and how to navigate it without going insane)

A budget to buy the world

In a perfect world (well, at least a better one), your brand would have access to infinite resources for everything: cool tech, high-profile employees, research and development resources, manufacturing, sales channels… and also, because why not, beautifully typeset, well-written product literature (manuals, quick guides, FAQs etc.), in all languages.

So imagine that in this perfect world, your company is launching a new product that comes with a great, but somewhat long-winded manual from your favorite technical writer.

Since your products are distributed all over the world, you know that most of your customers are likely to be native speakers of a language other than English. But as you have infinite resources, that’s no problem: You just have the manual translated into all languages spoken in all territories where the product will be sold. Problem solved!

In the real world, however, you will soon reach the limits both of your budget and your release schedule.

Assuming you have a 4,000-word manual and that you’re paying 0,20 € per word for high-quality translations handled by a professional language service provider, translating that manual into even the most common languages (say, all EU languages, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) will cost you…

4,000 words × 0,20 € × 27 languages = 21,600 € for translations alone – and that’s without layout and illustrations.

This is obviously a budget that would work for a car manufacturer – but prohibitively expensive for, say, a boutique guitar effect pedal manufacturer.

So looking at the available resources, you will probably resort to “the bare necessities” – which means calling your writer, asking him to cut down the manual to 2,500 words. You will also settle for five target languages (hoping that your Lithuanian and Dutch customers won’t mind). At roughly 2500 €, that would be an affordable solution, but not really a great one.

Suddenly, you learn that you can have your cake and eat it: translations of your product literature to any language, for free. This magic feature is built into the browsers that most users have on their devices. But do they know this? Can these browsers process your manuals? And what other models are there between “free” and “prohibitively expensive”?

Translation models / tiers

The following section outlines three routes that you can take if you want to allow users to read your brand’s product literature in their own language. This is an excerpt from our article “Translation tiers”, which covers more options.

Publishing → On-the-fly in-browser machine translation

aka Translation Tier 6

🇬🇧 → 🌍 → 🤖

Medium to low quality, free

Description

1. A document is published in the source language only (usually English) on the web.

2. The source document is translated on demand by end users invoking machine translation (as a browser feature), replacing the original content in place. All modern web browsers support free machine translation, either directly or via plugins / browser extensions.

• As the translation is created “on the fly”, there is obviously no review or other means of quality assurance.

Typical quality

Low to high, depending on topic, source material translation friendliness, and machine translation engine quality. In general, browser-side machine translation yields lower quality results than results from commercial machine translation engines such as DeepL.

Cost

Free (using machine translation engines made available and paid for by browser developers such as Google and Apple).

High-quality machine translation engine → Publishing

aka Translation Tier 5

🇬🇧 → 🤖 → 🌍

Medium to high quality, fast, low cost

Description

1. The source document is translated in full by passing it through a high-quality machine translation engine.

2. The translation is then published to the web.

• There is no review or editing of the machine translation by a human translator or subject-matter expert before publishing.

Typical quality

Medium to high, depending on topic, source material translation friendliness, and machine translation engine quality.

Cost

Low (using low-cost professional machine translation engines)

Professional human translator → Professional human reviewer → Publishing

aka Translation Tier 1

🇬🇧 → 👱🏻‍♂️ → 👩🏻 → 🌍

High quality, probably free of errors, resource-intensive, expensive

Description

1. The source document is translated by a human translator (using software and resources such as translation memories and termbases), paid for by the company publishing the document.

2. The translation is reviewed and edited as necessary by a second translator or subject-matter expert.

3. The translation is then published to the web.

Typical quality

Very high – professional translators and reviewers ensure accuracy, linguistic quality, and a low error rate.

Cost

Very high (typically 0.30 € / word, ignoring rebates for repetitions and matches from translation memories)

↻ 2025-08-21