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 3.1 Pro. 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.