Paid version of the Google Translate API for web developers

In May, Google deprecated their free translation API to the annoyance of many web developers. This past week, Google reinstated their translation API as a paid tool for businesses and web developers. The new and improved web translation API service provides a programmatic interface to access Google’s machine translation systems.  The API offers service for more than 50 languages and is hosted in Google’s cloud infrastructure, which has a built-in, "large-scale" learning vehicle.

Some developers may not be as happy with a paid version replacing the previous free version, but the good news is that many usage restrictions of previous versions have been removed.

Costs of web translation

Translation costs $20 per million (M) characters of text translated (or approximately $0.05/page, assuming 500 words/page). You can sign up by way of the console for a unit volume of 50 M chars/month.

Free usage for web developers

Web developers have until Dec. 1st 2011, to access a courtesy limit of 100K chars/day for building applications with the new translation API system.

Education institutions will continue to have free access to the service through the Google Translate Research API program.