Dutch Language: Facts for Translators

Dutch (nl, nld) is a world language. Wikidata records about 23.1M speakers. It is written in Dutch alphabet. It is an official language in 3 countries, including Belgium, Kingdom of the Netherlands and Suriname.

Dutch and Flemish (Belgium) differ in vocabulary and formality; compounds lengthen text. Informal je/jij is common even in marketing.

Expect text translated from English into Dutch to grow by roughly 15–35%, which matters for layouts, subtitles and page counts.

23.1M

Speakers

+15…+35%

Text length vs English

$0.12–0.24

Indicative rate / word

Translation guides

Where Dutch is official

Belgium
Kingdom of the Netherlands
Suriname

Rates for Dutch translation

Dutch falls in our nordic & dutch band: roughly $0.12–$0.24 per word for general commercial work. These are indicative ranges, not quotes — specialised, certified and rush work costs more, and literary translation is usually priced per 1,000 words.

For context, the median salaried translator or interpreter in the US earned $60,170 in May 2025 (BLS). See salaries by state →

Translation cost calculatorEstimate a quote by language, word count, subject and deadline.

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From Wikipedia

Dutch is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language and is the third most spoken Germanic language. In Europe, Dutch is the native language of most of the population of the Netherlands and Flanders. Dutch was one of the official languages of South Africa until 1925, when it was replaced by Afrikaans, a separate but partially mutually intelligible daughter language of Dutch. Afrikaans, depending on the definition used, may be considered a sister language, spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, and evolving from Cape Dutch dialects.