Translation tiers
This document outlines the various workflows and publishing models for translated/localized content.
Professional human translator → Professional human reviewer → Publishing
aka Translation Tier 1
🇬🇧 → 👱🏻♂️ → 👩🏻 → 🌍
High quality, probably free of errors, resource-intensive, expensive
Description
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.
The translation is reviewed and edited as necessary by a second translator or subject-matter expert.
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)
Professional human translator → Publishing
🇬🇧 → 👱🏻♂️ → 🌍
aka Translation Tier 2
High quality, probably very few errors, resource-intensive, expensive
Description
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.
The translation is then published to the web.
- There is no review or editing of the translation by a second translator or subject-matter expert before publishing.
Typical quality
High – Professional translations are usually correct in terms of content and language, but since there is no proofreading, errors can slip through.
Cost
High (typically 0.20 € / word, ignoring rebates for repetitions and matches from translation memories)
Crowd-sourced human translation → Publishing
aka Translation Tier 3
🇬🇧 → 👱🏻♂️👩🏻👨🏻 → 🌍
Unpredictable quality, free or cheap
Description
The source document is translated and reviewed by a team of volunteer human translators using collaborative translation software environments, which may provide additional tools such as translation memories and termbases.
The translation is then published to the web.
- There may be a review of the translation by other translators or subject-matter experts before publishing, depending on the project workflow.
Typical quality
Variable - mixed teams of enthusiasts and subject-matter experts may deliver high-quality and error-free translations depending on their qualifications, but professional quality is not always guaranteed.
Cost
Free (assuming voluntary translators work for free, which requires strong enthusiasm for the respective project)
High-quality machine translation engine + human reviewer → Publishing
aka Translation Tier 4
🇬🇧 → 🤖 → 👩🏻️ → 🌍
High quality, probably very few errors, fairly resource intensive, medium cost
Description
The source document is translated in full by passing it through a high-quality machine translation engine.
The machine translation is reviewed and edited by a human translator or subject-matter expert.
The translation is then published to the web.
Typical quality
High – machine translations post-edited by proofreaders / subject-matter experts will usually be correct in terms of content and language. Still, errors are more likely to slip through than with “human first” workflows, as the focus is on the translation’s consistency, not accuracy with regard to the source.
Cost
Medium (typically 0.15 € / word, ignoring rebates for repetitions and matches from translation memories)
High-quality machine translation engine → Publishing
aka Translation Tier 5
🇬🇧 → 🤖 → 🌍
Medium to high quality, fast, low cost
Description
The source document is translated in full by passing it through a high-quality machine translation engine.
The translation is then published to the web.
- There is no review or editing of the 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)
Publishing → On-the-fly in-browser machine translation
aka Translation Tier 6
🇬🇧 → 🌍 → 🤖
Medium to low quality, free
Description
A document is published in the source language only (usually English) on the web.
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).
↻ 2025-08-21