What live translation actually costs.

The short version

Live translation is priced one of three ways, and which one you are quoted has more effect on the total than any negotiation:

• Human interpreters — priced per interpreter, per language, per day, usually with a half-day minimum and a two-person team per language for anything over about an hour.
• Rented equipment — priced per receiver, per day, plus transmitters, plus a booth, plus delivery, plus the staff member who hands them out and counts them back in.
• Phone-based translation — priced on usage: how many languages, for how many hours. The audience brings the hardware, so audience size drops out of the equation entirely.

The first two scale with the size of your event. The third scales only with how much translating you actually do.

What drives the price, model by model

Human interpreters

The gold standard, and for some rooms the only responsible option. Conference interpreting is genuinely hard work: for sessions longer than roughly an hour, professional practice is two interpreters per language rotating every 20–30 minutes, because sustained simultaneous interpreting degrades fast. So a three-language conference day is not three people, it is six, plus booths for each, plus the receivers for the audience.

What moves the number: the number of languages, the number of hours, whether the subject needs a specialist (legal, medical, technical), how far the interpreters travel, and whether you need booths built in a room that has none.

Rented receiver hardware

The classic assistive-listening and tour-guide setup: a transmitter at the front, a receiver and headset for each listener. It works, it is well understood, and it is priced per unit per day — which means the cost is a direct function of how many people might want one.

What moves the number: the receiver count, the number of days, delivery and collection, damage and loss (budget for both), and the staffing cost of distributing and recovering the units. That last one is real and routinely left out of quotes: someone has to stand at a table before and after, and someone has to charge and sanitise a hundred earpieces.

Phone-based translation

Listeners use the device already in their pocket, so there is no hardware line at all. Pricing is usage-based, and the unit that matters is the language-hour: one language, translated, for one hour. Two languages for one hour is two language-hours. One language for two hours is also two language-hours.

What moves the number: languages × hours. What does not move it: how many people are listening. Ten listeners and ten thousand listeners on the same language cost the same, because the work being done is translating one stream, not serving one person.

How to estimate your own event

For any usage-priced tool, including Koine, the arithmetic is the same:

rooms × languages × hours = language-hours

A two-track conference day running three languages for six hours in each track is 2 × 3 × 6 = 36 language-hours. On Koine's flat event rate of $10 per language-hour, that is $360, billed once. A single Sunday service in two languages for ninety minutes is 1 × 2 × 1.5 = 3 language-hours.

Two things to sanity-check before you multiply:

• Count the hours you actually translate, not the hours the venue is open. A conference day is rarely eight hours of talking — coffee breaks, lunch and setup are not translated.
• Count languages you will really run. It is tempting to list every language present. Look at what people would genuinely use, and remember you can add one later.

For recurring rooms — a weekly service, a class, a standing meeting — monthly plans are usually cheaper than the event rate, because they prepay a bundle of language-hours. Koine's run from $79/month (12 language-hours) to $399/month (100). The pricing page has the full breakdown and a calculator for events.

When a cheaper tool is the wrong answer

Worth saying plainly, because it is the part most vendors skip. Machine translation of any kind — Koine included — is not the right choice when:

• The words carry legal weight. Court proceedings, formal diplomatic settings, medical consent, anything where a mistranslated sentence is a liability rather than an inconvenience. Use a qualified human interpreter.
• You need certified interpretation. Some public bodies and regulated settings require a credentialed interpreter by law or policy. That is a compliance question, not a technology question.
• The audio is bad and cannot be fixed. Every translation system, human or machine, is limited by what it can hear. A phone at the back of a reverberant hall produces poor results in any language. If you cannot get a soundboard feed or a decent mic on the speaker, solve that first.

Where machine translation earns its place is the very large middle: the services, lectures, all-hands, council meetings and conference tracks that today get no translation at all, because a human team was never in the budget. The honest comparison is usually not "interpreter versus app" — it is "app versus nothing".