Choose the Right AI Model and Translation Framework
A decision guide for picking an AI model tier and a translation framework before you start a long-document translation project.
Quality Tiers
- Premium ($5 per 20K words). Gemini 3.5 Flash. Best for literary fiction, poetry, and publication-quality work where tone, register, and cultural nuance matter most.
- Standard ($2 per 20K words). Gemini 3 Flash. Best for most professional documents, business books, and clear-prose non-fiction.
- Budget ($1 per 20K words). Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite. Best for internal drafts, personal reading copies, and high-volume reference material.
Frameworks
- Skopos Theory (Vermeer): translation purpose drives every decision.
- Newmark Semantic: preserve author's exact wording and structure.
- Newmark Communicative: produce natural, reader-friendly target text.
- Venuti Foreignization: keep cultural otherness visible in the translation.
- Venuti Domestication: adapt culture-bound items to target reader expectations.
- Nord Functionalist: match brief, audience, and channel of communication.
- House Register Model: overt vs covert translation against source register.
- Koller Equivalence: formal/denotative/connotative/pragmatic equivalence trade-offs.
This guide is decision support, not a sample-output preview. Short previews on arbitrary text rarely reveal the differences that matter across a full document.