A letter in another language, a supplier's manual, a form from abroad: most of the time you just need to understand what it says. A quick machine translation of the text does that well enough.

What Translate PDF does

Translate PDF works in three steps: it reads the text from your PDF, translates it with an online machine-translation service, and builds a new, plain-text PDF containing the translation.

That means:

• You choose the source and target language (about 50 are offered).
• The output is a simple text document on A4 pages.
• The original layout, images, tables and formatting are not kept.
• Scanned PDFs have no text to read, so run OCR PDF first. Our OCR guide helps with accuracy. The OCR tool currently reads English best.

Steps

1. Open Translate PDF and upload your file (up to 50 MB).
2. Select the language of the document and the language you want.
3. Translate and download the new PDF.
4. Read it, and keep the original beside it for reference.

Privacy: read this first

The text of your document is sent to a third-party translation service to be translated. Don't use it for confidential or personal documents unless you are comfortable with that, and follow your organisation's policy. Where privacy matters, translate a redacted version or use a service your organisation has approved.

Getting better results

• Choose the source language yourself rather than guessing.
• Use clean text. A PDF with real text translates better than an OCR scan full of errors.
• Translate short sections if a long document fails, using Extract Pages or Split PDF to cut it into parts. Free translation services can limit how much text they handle.
• Expect awkward phrasing with idioms, legal wording and technical terms.
• Be careful with scripts. The output uses a basic Latin-alphabet font, so it suits target languages written with Latin letters best. Check that non-Latin languages display correctly before relying on the result.

When machine translation isn't enough

Contracts, medical records, immigration papers, and anything published or legally binding need a qualified human translator. Use the tool to understand the gist and to decide whether a professional translation is needed.

If you want the words, not a PDF

To copy the source text and paste it into another translator, use Extract Text. See how to extract text.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the translated PDF look like the original?

No. It is plain text without the original layout or images.

How accurate is it?

It is a machine translation. Good for understanding, not for legal or published use.

Why did my scanned PDF fail?

There was no readable text. Run OCR first.

Is my document private?

Its text is sent to an external translation service, so avoid confidential material.