Translate a PDF

Translate a PDF to English, free and without signing up

A research paper, a user manual, a report, course notes, a letter from a school or a government office, or a contract you received in Spanish, Chinese, French or Arabic: drop the file and read it in English a few moments later. The PDF's text is extracted in your browser, split into chunks at the end of paragraphs, then translated by artificial intelligence, which respects names, numbers and amounts. The translation appears page by page, with each page number, and downloads as Word to edit it, as PDF to keep or print it, or as plain text. The tool works on a computer (Windows, Mac) as well as on a phone (iPhone, Android), with no software or account. It also works the other way: translate an English document into Spanish, Chinese or Portuguese, for example to share it with family or colleagues abroad.

What gets translated, and what doesn't

The tool translates the PDF's text, not its layout. You get the translated content, page by page, with its paragraphs and headings; however, columns, block positions, fonts, images and charts are not reproduced. A table becomes a series of text lines, and text written inside an image (a diagram, a screenshot, a logo) isn't read, unless the whole page is a scan. To rework the formatting, download the Word version and lay it out the way you like. To translate the text in a photo or a screenshot, use "Translate Image" instead, which writes the translation onto the image. And if you only want the key points of a long document, "Summarize PDF" condenses it into a few paragraphs.

Scanned, protected or very long PDFs: what to do

A PDF created by Word, a website or other software contains text: it is read instantly. A scanned or photographed PDF only contains images: the tool detects this and offers to read its pages with OCR, on your device, after you choose the document's language (the first 30 image pages; beyond that, run it through "OCR PDF" first). A PDF protected by an opening password must be unlocked first. Each translation covers up to 150,000 characters, or about 50 pages of dense text: for a book or a long report, choose "Some pages" and translate it in several goes (for example 1-40, then 41-80). Allow a few seconds per page; if the service is very busy, the tool waits and tries again on its own, and you can stop the translation and resume it where it left off.

Machine translation: how to use it well

AI translation is very good for understanding a document, preparing a reply or working on a foreign-language text. It can still get a technical term, an ambiguous phrase or a passage poorly extracted from the PDF wrong (text in tight columns, a complex table, a blurry scan). For a contract, a court decision, a prescription or a document you need to sign, have the translation checked by someone fluent in both languages. And for official procedures (immigration, university admissions, a marriage abroad, a professional license), authorities usually require a certified translation, signed by a qualified translator: a machine translation doesn't replace it. Bilingual mode helps you check: each original paragraph is followed by its translation.