Best LLMs for Translation and Localization
Output roughly equal to input — both token rates count.
Typical request this page prices
- Quality floor: Top 60% of priced models by Intelligence Index (≥ 11.9).
- Costs use each provider’s current standard rates, with cached tokens at the cached-input rate where one is published. Speed is from Artificial Analysis where measured.
Lowest cost that meets the bar
Models that clear the quality floor, ordered by estimated cost for the request above.
| Model | Intelligence | Speed | Cheapest host | Input / output per 1M | Per 1,000 requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ling-3.0-flash-VL InclusionAI | 24.6 | 147tok/s | OpenRouter 3 providers | $0.021 / $0.062 cached $0.0042 | $0.128 |
| Ling 3.0 Flash InclusionAI | 20.1 | - | OpenRouter 3 providers | $0.021 / $0.063 cached $0.0042 | $0.130 |
| Qwen3.5 4B Alibaba | 13.1 | 20tok/s | Empirio Labs 2 providers | $0.040 / $0.070 cached $0.020 | $0.169 |
| Ling-3.0-flash-Fin InclusionAI | 22.6 | 317tok/s | Runcrate 3 providers | $0.042 / $0.120 | $0.255 |
| Mercury 2.5 Inception | 12.3 | 833tok/s | OpenRouter 1 provider | $0.040 / $0.150 cached $0.0040 | $0.295 |
| Nemotron 3.5 Lightning NVIDIA | 12.9 | 290tok/s | IO.NET 3 providers | $0.064 / $0.152 cached $0.032 | $0.335 |
| Qwen 3.5 9B Alibaba · 256K context | 13.3 | 99tok/s | Empirio Labs 6 providers | $0.090 / $0.130 cached $0.045 | $0.336 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash DeepSeek · 1.0M context | 34.3 | - | Deep Infra 19 providers | $0.060 / $0.180 cached $0.015 | $0.371 |
Highest-scoring options
Ordered by Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, with the cost of the same request.
| Model | Intelligence | Speed | Cheapest host | Input / output per 1M | Per 1,000 requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5.5 Anthropic | 57.6 | 97tok/s | Deep Infra 6 providers | $4.00 / $20.00 cached $0.200 | $37.43 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 Anthropic | 56 | 135tok/s | Anthropic 6 providers | $2.00 / $10.00 cached $0.100 | $18.71 |
| Claude Fable 5.1 Anthropic | 53.4 | 72tok/s | DigitalOcean 4 providers | $10.00 / $50.00 cached $0.250 | $93.54 |
| GPT-6 Astra OpenAI | 52.7 | 63tok/s | Velokey 7 providers | $3.00 / $15.00 cached $0.300 | $28.09 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol OpenAI | 51.8 | 65tok/s | Microsoft Azure 6 providers | $2.00 / $10.00 cached $0.100 | $18.71 |
| Claude Opus 5 Anthropic | 50.8 | - | Velokey 7 providers | $2.00 / $10.00 cached $0.200 | $18.73 |
| Claude Fable 5 Anthropic · 1.0M context | 49.6 | - | Velokey 6 providers | $4.00 / $20.00 cached $0.400 | $37.46 |
| Muse Spark 1.3 Meta | 48.1 | 115tok/s | OpenRouter 2 providers | $1.25 / $4.25 cached $0.150 | $8.51 |
Compare every model and provider on the LLM API pricing table.
How to choose an LLM for translation & localization
Translation is one of the few workloads where output is as large as input: every source token produces roughly one target token, and some languages tokenize less efficiently than English, so output can be larger. The output rate weighs heavily in the cost estimate.
A glossary and style guide in the system prompt is the only cacheable part, so the estimate assumes a small cached share.
General benchmark scores are a rough guide only. Quality varies by language pair, and models trained with more data in a given language can outperform higher-scoring models on it. Test on your own language pairs before committing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do some languages cost more to translate into?
Tokenizers are trained mostly on English and a few other languages, so text in other scripts can take more tokens for the same content. Translating into those languages produces more output tokens per sentence.
Is an LLM better than a dedicated translation API?
LLMs follow glossaries, tone instructions and formatting constraints more flexibly. Dedicated translation APIs can be cheaper per character for plain text. Compare both on a sample of your own content.
Can I batch translation jobs?
Yes. Localization backfills are a good fit for batch APIs, which bill below standard rates where offered. See each model’s page for batch pricing.