Book Translation Services in the UK for Authors and Publishers

What Do Our Book Translation Services Include?

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Your book goes to one specialist who has already worked in its genre, and their draft is then revised by a second. We select a translator from a shortlist of people who read and write the kind of book you have written: a crime novel goes to someone who has carried tension through dialogue before, a memoir to someone who can hold a first-person voice for 80,000 words, a cookbook to someone who knows that oven temperatures and shopping habits differ from one market to the next. Matching by genre, not only by language pair, is what makes a finished edition read as though it had been written in the original language.

Book translations are two-person work here, which is what ISO 17100:2015 requires. The first translator drafts the whole book and checks their own work against the source. A second linguist then revises it line by line for voice, register and consistency of names, places and invented terms. Your account manager runs the last check on figures, headings and layout before delivery. Nothing in that sequence is an extra: the revision stage is inside the price you are quoted, and it is the difference between quality translations and a first draft.

We sign a non-disclosure agreement before you upload your manuscript, so an unpublished book never sits on an open system. Access is restricted to the people doing the translation work — the person translating, the reviser and your account manager — and the same handling covers proof copies, embargoed titles and anything a house has not yet announced. Authors keep the rights they came with; we hold no claim over your book, the translated work or its future editions.

We work in 150+ languages with more than 2,000 translators, so a book can go into Spanish, French, German,Italian and Portuguese as easily as into Japanese, Korean, Arabic or Polish, and a niche language pair is a question of scheduling rather than of whether it can be done at all. Rates run from £0.15 per word for a common pair in a mainstream genre to £0.20 per word where the subject is technical or the language is rare. Ask for a quote and you will have it within 1 hour, itemised by word count.

Which Book Genres Do We Cover?

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We cover fiction, non-fiction, children’s books and academic titles, with a genre specialist on each. Specialists who know a form from the inside catch what a generalist cannot.

Who Do We Translate Books For in the UK and Ireland?

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Self-publishing authors, trade imprints, university presses and literary agents. An author who has produced a self-published book on Amazon KDP, Apple Books or Kobo gets back files formatted to upload, with the front and back matter translated as well as the body, so the new edition is complete on the day it goes live. Print editions and ebooks are handled the same way. Nielsen is the ISBN agency for the UK and Ireland, and although an ISBN is not a legal requirement here and confers no copyright protection, each edition and each format needs its own; the International ISBN Agency states that each different language edition of a book needs one as well. That is how a single title gets global reach and readers all over the world without a foreign publisher.

Who Holds Copyright and Translation Rights Under UK Law?

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Translating a book that is still in copyright needs the rights holder’s permission, because UK copyright law treats a translation as an adaptation and only the copyright owner can authorise one. Copyright in a literary work lasts 70 years from the end of the year in which the author died, so that is the test for whether a title is still protected here, and other countries set their own terms — a book that is free to translate in one country can still be protected in another. If you wrote the book and have not signed the foreign-language rights away, the permission is yours to give.

For a self-published author the rights are usually yours to use, and you can commission an edition directly. If a house has your book, the head contract decides: foreign-language rights are often granted to the publisher, sometimes handled by your agent, and the answer sits in the rights schedule rather than in custom. Read it before you commission anything, because an edition you cannot licence is an expensive object.

The translator has a position of their own in UK practice. A translation can attract copyright of its own, and copyright in a work normally belongs first to the person who created it, which is why the model translator-publisher contract published by the Translators Association — the Society of Authors’ specialist group for literary translators — puts the copyright notice in the translator’s name and has the translator grant the publisher an exclusive licence rather than assign the copyright outright. The same model contract reserves Public Lending Right to the translator, pays a fee plus a royalty, and returns the rights if the edition goes out of print. With us, the arrangement is agreed in writing before work starts and we make no claim on your book or on its editions.

Credit is the other half of the question, and in the literary world it is worth money as well as recognition. The Society of Authors campaigns for translators to be named on covers, in metadata and listings, and in reviews, under its Name the Translator campaign, and in 2021 it published the #TranslatorsOnTheCover open letter, written by Jennifer Croft and Mark Haddon, in which authors undertake to ask their publishers for the translator’s name on the front cover. Public Lending Right, administered by the British Library, fixes a translator’s share of a book at 30% where the translator is named on the title page or elsewhere in the book, and Ireland’s Public Lending Remuneration scheme uses the same 30% default — so a name in the right place is also a claim on library-loan payments.

What Does a Book Translation Cost in the UK?

A book is priced per word of the source text: from £0.15 per word for a common pair in a standard genre, from £0.20 per word where the material is technical or the language is rare. Nothing is added afterwards — the revision pass, the project management and the delivery files are inside that figure.

What the UK market looks like around that rate:

• The Society of Authors publishes no recommended rate for literary work and says competition law does not allow it to recommend one. Fees are negotiated book by book between translator and publisher, and what they come to varies with the length, the language and the translator’s experience.
• Grants change the arithmetic: PEN Translates, run by English PEN and supported using public funding by Arts Council England, funds a share of a book’s translation costs for UK-based publishers, and that share is larger for publishers with a smaller annual turnover. In Ireland, Literature Ireland contributes to the translator’s fee through its translation grant programme.

Those are publishing-side figures rather than ours. What you pay for professional book translation here is £0.15–£0.20 per word for a finished edition that a second specialist has read end to end, with the project management and the delivery files inside that figure.

Send the manuscript, or the part of it you want priced, through our secure upload and you get a quote within 1 hour: the rate, the schedule and the total, itemised. There is no charge for it.

What moves the cost of translation:

• The length of the source manuscript, which is what the rate is applied to
• The language pair, and whether the edition is aimed at one market or several
• Your publication date, and whether the schedule has to be compressed to meet it
• Subject matter: a technical or scholarly book needs a specialist and closer checking
• Layout and typesetting, and any certified translation or notarised paperwork the edition needs — a rights document or a permission letter rather than the book itself

How Does Our Translation Company Handle Your Manuscript, Step by Step?

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Why Does a Novel Have to Be Re-Created Rather Than Rendered Word for Word?

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A novel has to be re-created in the new language because its effect lives in rhythm, register and connotation, none of which survive a word-for-word swap. Linguistic accuracy is the floor rather than the finish: a contract is translated for exactness, a novel so that a reader in Madrid or Tokyo feels what a reader in London felt. Rendered literally, prose goes stiff: the jokes land late, the voice flattens, and sentences that were meant to be short and blunt arrive padded. The translator’s job is to work out what a passage does, then build something in the target language that does the same thing.

English prose that runs in short declarative sentences can be turned into long subordinate clauses in French or German without a single error of meaning, and still read as a different book. The same applies to idiom, register and names. Someone who translates books for a living reads as a critic and writes as an author, which is why the nuances of different languages are a craft problem rather than a dictionary problem, and why an edition that reads well will resonate with the readership it was made for.

This is also the clearest answer to whether you can put a manuscript through a free online engine and tidy it up afterwards. AI translation can render a label or a menu accurately, and it will not tell you where it lost the voice; the tidying is where the work reappears. Gig listings have the same catch — a headline price that rarely includes a second specialist reading the whole book against the original. We assign a specialist by genre, a romance hand for pacing, a science-fiction reader for invented vocabulary, so that your book reads like a book and not like a rendering of one.

Which Related Services Can We Add to Your Book Project?

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A book rarely travels alone. The related language services authors ask us for most often:

• Poetry, short stories and essays go to our literary translation team.
• Papers, journals and university teaching material sit with academic translation.
• Trailers, author interviews and film material are handled by our subtitling service.
• Everything else we do is listed under translation services.

How Do I Choose the Right Book Translation Service or Translator?

Ask for four things before you commit, and every one of them is checkable. First a named translator who writes into their own first language and has published book-length work in your genre — ask for a title you can look up. Second a paid sample of two or three pages, because voice shows in that much text and in nothing shorter. Third a reviser: on a book-length job a second linguist reads the whole manuscript against the source, which is what ISO 17100:2015 requires and what translation quality comes down to over 90,000 words, because it is what stops a character name or a recurring term drifting between chapter 2 and chapter 30. Fourth an itemised quote with a delivery schedule and an NDA — £0.15 to £0.20 per word of source text here, back within 1 hour. Authors and imprints hire either a translator directly or a translation agency; the agency adds what is hard to arrange alone on a book, which is the glossary kept across a series and a schedule somebody else owns.

How much does it cost to translate a book?

Between £0.15 and £0.20 per word of the source text with us, so the length of the manuscript decides the total and your itemised quote arrives within 1 hour. The rate sits at the lower end for a common pair in a mainstream genre and at the upper end for technical subjects and rare languages.

How are literary translators paid in the UK?

A literary translator working for a UK publisher is usually paid a fee per thousand words, often half on signature and half on delivery, plus a royalty share and Public Lending Right on library loans — the shape set out in the Translators Association’s model contract. What the fee comes to varies with the book, the language and the translator’s experience, and the Society of Authors publishes no recommended figure. None of that is what an author pays us: our rate buys a finished edition that a second specialist has already read.