Chinese translation rates per word and per character

50 to 200 yuan per 1,000 characters: that is the translation rate written into a Chinese regulation, and it is not the price you’ll be quoted.

In China, translation is priced per 1,000 Chinese characters, and the tenders we read count them on the Chinese text whichever way the job runs. Official reference points run from that 50 to 200 yuan, a publishers’ default, to a 1,000-yuan ceiling the Shanghai Gold Exchange set in 2025. Your per-word price depends on how many characters your text becomes.

Chinese translation: official reference points. Edition 1, October 2026. Dollar figures at the CFETS central parity of October 16, 2026, US$1 = 6.7220 yuan.

Where the 50 to 200 yuan figure comes from

The oldest reference point is a 2014 regulation on paying authors and translators, issued by the National Copyright Administration and the National Development and Reform Commission. It sets what a publisher pays for a written work, and article 2 says its rates apply only when the two sides agreed nothing, or agreed something unclear. Article 5 holds the translation line.

Two details in that line matter for a buyer. A part of 1,000 characters counts as a full 1,000, so under this rule a 300-character label is billed as 1,000. And the same article counts characters on the printed page: the characters in a line, times the lines. That’s a publisher’s count, not the one a business client runs in Word. Article 9 adds a sting for publishers. If there’s no written contract, or no agreed rate, and a dispute follows, the publisher pays at the top of the scale.

What the regulation does show is how old the unit is. China has priced translation per 1,000 characters for a long time. It also shows how far the state’s default for a book translation sits below what public buyers now allow for business documents. A business client that signs a contract with its own rate isn’t bound by it at all.

What public buyers set and paid

Tenders are where Chinese public buyers write their prices down, and the careful ones state the unit, the counting rule and the tax.

The Shanghai Gold Exchange describes itself as a market for gold and other precious metals, approved by the State Council and set up by the People’s Bank of China, running since October 2002. The tender covers business rules, research and financial reports, legal documents and IT documents. That’s demanding material, and it helps explain the ceiling. It’s still the most a bidder could ask, not what anyone was paid.

An award shows what a buyer actually agreed to.

That contract mostly covers material for international meetings: background papers, slides, publicity material and the reports that follow. The notice doesn’t say which way the English runs or how characters are counted, so read 180 yuan as that buyer’s price for that kind of work.

Don’t read the gap between 180 and 1,000 as noise: the lower figure was agreed for years of meeting papers, while the higher one caps what an exchange would pay for its rules and legal texts. In these records, subject and risk move the price more than direction does.

Read together, the public records on this page run from 180 to 1,000 yuan per 1,000 characters for business translation, tax included where the notice says so. On the example ratio below, that’s roughly $0.04 to $0.23 per English word. Use it to spot a bid that’s far outside the records, not to set the price.

From characters to your word count

If all you need is a budget line, that span is enough. The rest of this page is for checking a real quote against it.

You know your English word count, and the Chinese quote is per 1,000 characters. To compare the two you need a ratio between them, and the reliable way to get one is to count.

We took one white paper that the State Council Information Office published in both languages in November 2024: China’s Rural Roads in the New Era in English on english.www.gov.cn, and 新时代的中国农村公路发展 in Chinese on gov.cn. Chinese is the original. We counted the preface, the first chapter and the conclusion, because they carry no boxed case studies and so hold the same text in both versions. Chinese characters were counted without spaces, punctuation included, as Word counts them. (In Word, the count sits under Review, then Word Count.)

Put that ratio into the formula and each reference point becomes a price per English word. The figures below are an example, not a market price.

Run the same count on your own document. If you already have an old translation of something similar, paste both versions into Word and compare the two counts; it takes a few minutes. A ratio measured on policy prose won’t hold for app strings, a parts list or a contract, and a text written first in English may not expand the same way into Chinese.

Why two quotes for the same file differ

• Subject and terminology. A contract or an engineering spec takes longer than a brochure and needs a translator who knows the field.
• Who checks the work. Some quotes cover translation alone and some add a second linguist’s revision, so ask which one you’re reading. China’s national standard for translation services, GB/T 19363.1-2022, has been in force since July 1, 2023, though the public register doesn’t publish its text.
• Machine translation with human post-editing. It’s a separate service, with its own national standard, GB/T 40036-2021, Translation services, Post-editing of machine translation output, Requirements, in force since November 1, 2021.
• File format and layout. A scanned PDF, a design file or a spreadsheet of app strings adds work that a clean Word file doesn’t.
• Deadline. The Shanghai Gold Exchange tender gave bidders extra points for returning 3,000 to 10,000 characters in three working days instead of four.
• A certified or sealed translation. If an authority needs a stamp on it, read what Chinese law requires of a certified translation first.

Spoken interpreting is priced by the day, not by the character, and the guide to hiring an interpreter in China covers it.

What to send with a request for a quote

• The file in an editable format (Word, Excel or the source file), not a scan.
• The word or character count, and how you counted it.
• Who will read the translation, and where.
• A glossary or past translations, if you have them.
• The deadline, and whether part of the file can come first.

Of the five, the count is the one to get right. Two translators can quote the same rate and still send different totals if one counts the English source and the other the Chinese result, or one counts spaces and the other doesn’t. Say which count you want quoted, and ask for the total as well as the rate.

How to write a brief freelancers can bid on shows how to set this out so every bid prices the same thing.

Edition history

Edition 1, October 18, 2026. The procurement records are read again every quarter; the next review is due in January 2027.

Translators who do this work bid on posted jobs in the translation category, and How it works and Pricing explain the rest. Post the file’s character count and subject, and compare bids on the same unit. Start a brief.