The commoditization of large language models is a game changer here and a bit catalyst for us embarking on this adventure.
GPT 4.1 mini comes in at 1.6 dollars for about half a million words translated.
Gemini 2.5 Flash comes in at 60 cents for the same story
Browsing through https://openrouter.ai/ you can find many other capable models that come at even cheaper (or free) price points.
As the days pass, the capabilities are going up and price is going down.
With the old translation services, we saw a very high price that barely moved for a decade.