Google launches paid web translation for businesses

Google has invited businesses and commercial software developers to integrate its automated translation service into their web pages and web applications for a fee.

In a blog post on Wednesday by Google Translate product manager Jeff Chin, Google announced the release of a paid version of the Google Translate API to go along with the free version for academic users and the Google Website Translator gadget for other users.

"The Google Translate API provides a programmatic interface to access Google's latest machine translation technology," Chin wrote. "This API supports translations between 50+ languages (more than 2,500 language pairs) and is made possible by Google's cloud infrastructure and large-scale machine learning algorithms."

Those using the commercial version of the API will pay $20 (£12) per million characters of text translated. Chin estimated this would mean around $0.05 per page, assuming the page contains 500 words. There is a limit of 50 million characters per month.

Chin said developers who have already been using the Translate API Console and version 2 of the API will continue to get a "courtesy limit" of 100,000 characters each day until 1 December or until they switch to the paid API.

Google's automated translation system is already widely used, and browser extensions make it possible to automatically translate web pages to the user's language.

In March, the European Patent Office announced it would use the service to translate patents into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and any of 28 European languages.