Google Cloud Translation API
Neural machine translation for 135+ languages
Freemium
✓ Verified
🇺🇸 United States
Google Cloud Translation API is the most widely-used machine translation API, backed by Google’s Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology. It covers 135+ languages with automatic language detection. The Advanced (v3) tier supports custom models, glossaries, and batch translation of documents. Pricing is $20 per million characters for the NMT model. Used across e-commerce, travel, media, and enterprise applications globally. Deep integration with other Google Cloud services makes it natural for GCP-based architectures.
API Details
Auth Method
API Key
Pricing Model
Freemium
Free Tier
Yes — 500,000 characters/month free
Rate Limit
6,000,000 chars/min
Format
REST / JSON
Versioning
v2 (Basic), v3 (Advanced)
SLA / Uptime
99.9%
Compliance
SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR
Geographic Restrictions
Global
Last Verified
2026-02-20
Categories
Frequently Asked Questions
Google Cloud Translation API costs $20 per million characters for the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model. The first 500,000 characters per month are free. There is no per-request charge u2014 only per character. Documents (PDF, DOCX, PPTX) are charged the same rate but processed as formatted documents preserving layout.
Google Cloud Translation API supports over 130 languages. Quality varies u2014 it is excellent for high-resource languages like Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Portuguese, and reasonable for mid-resource languages. For very low-resource languages, consider checking specific language pair quality before committing to production use.
The Basic tier (v2) offers simple text translation via API key. The Advanced tier (v3) adds document translation (preserving formatting), glossary support for custom terminology, batch translation for large files, AutoML custom models, and model selection. Advanced requires authentication via service account. Use Advanced for enterprise and document workflows.
Yes. You can omit the source language parameter and Google will automatically detect it. You can also call the language detection endpoint separately to identify the language of a text before translating. Confidence scores are provided for detection. Auto-detection accuracy is very high for text over 20 words.