A free PDF translator for the documents you need to understand
A supplier in Shenzhen sends a product manual in Chinese. A German university emails its admission rules. A state government circular arrives only in Hindi, or only in English, and half the office cannot read it comfortably. You do not need a certified translation for any of these. You need to know what the document says, today.
That is the job of this PDF translator. Upload the file, choose the languages and download a translated PDF. It is free, with no sign-up, no watermark and no daily limit. Copying text out of a PDF and pasting it into a translation box, one screen at a time, is the slow way. Here the whole PDF document goes in at once and comes back with its pages in order.
The 19 languages you can translate between
Choose any of these under From and To:
- English, Hindi, Bengali and Urdu
- Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch
- Russian, Ukrainian and Polish
- Arabic and Turkish
- Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian
Languages that are not supported yet
You cannot translate a PDF from Kannada to English here, because Kannada is not among the 19 languages. The same goes for Tamil, so this is not a PDF translator for English to Tamil. Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Punjabi are missing too. Outside India, you cannot translate a PDF from Sinhala to English or from Vietnamese to English yet, and among European languages Swedish is not there either. If your document is in one of these, the page will not help, and we would rather say so than return nonsense.
Translate PDF to English from Chinese, Spanish, German or Hindi
English is the most common target. To translate a PDF into English, leave From on Detect language, set To to English and click the button. If a document mixes two languages, or is very short, choose the source language yourself for a better result.
Chinese, Spanish and German documents
People most often translate PDFs from Chinese to English for product manuals, test reports and supplier quotations, and here that is free with no page-by-page copying. From Spanish to English, it is usually rental contracts, medical notes and school records. When you translate a PDF from German to English, expect formal letter phrases to sound stiff. In all three, names of people, companies and places sometimes get translated when they should not.
Translate a PDF from Hindi to English, free
Government orders, court notices, land records and school certificates are often issued in Hindi. If the PDF was typed on a computer, it translates directly. If it is a scan or a photo of paper, there is no real text inside for the translator to read. First run it through OCR PDF with the Hindi option, then upload the searchable file here. Old documents typed in non-Unicode Hindi fonts may come out as nonsense, because the letters in the file are not stored as real Hindi characters.
The best way to translate a PDF to English and trust the result
Keep the original open next to the translation. Since page numbers match, you can jump to the same page in both. Read the translation for meaning, and go back to the original for every number, date, amount and name.
Translate a PDF from English to Hindi
The To box starts on Hindi, because this is the request we hear most: a policy document, a bank's terms, an appliance manual or study notes that a parent, a customer or a colleague would follow more easily in Hindi.
How to translate an English PDF to Hindi: select the file, set From to English, leave To on Hindi and click Translate PDF. You can translate a PDF to Hindi for free as often as you like. The Hindi text is written in Devanagari script.
Expect textbook Hindi. A PDF translator working in Hindi tends to choose formal words where a person would use everyday ones, and technical terms may be translated when most readers would prefer the English word. For anything you will print and hand out, ask a fluent reader to look it over.
Translate a PDF from Urdu, Bengali, Arabic, Russian or Portuguese to English
English is the target for most of the other 18 languages too. The steps never change: select the file, pick the source language under From, set To to English. A few notes on the pairs people ask about most.
Urdu, Bengali and Arabic to English
Urdu and Arabic are written right to left, and the translated English is placed where each original text block sat, so read the result block by block rather than expecting the original column order. To translate a PDF from Urdu to English or from Arabic to English, the file must contain real Unicode text. Many Urdu documents are exported as images of calligraphy, and a Bengali PDF from an older typing tool may store letters as shapes. Both come back empty. Since our OCR does not read these three scripts yet, such scans cannot be prepared here; ask the sender for a text version.
Russian, Portuguese and Indonesian to English
These are strong pairs. To translate a PDF from Russian to English, choose Russian under From rather than Detect language if the file also contains English product names, which can confuse detection. Portuguese to English is a common request for Brazilian trade documents. Translating a PDF from Indonesian to English suits export paperwork, customs forms and university notices, and the reverse direction is available too.
Translate a PDF to Arabic, Chinese or another language
You can also translate a PDF to Arabic, or into any of the 19 languages, from any other. Pick the target under To and the source under From, or leave From on Detect language. The translated text lands where the original blocks were, so a heading translated into Arabic still sits at the top of its page. Because images and design are not carried over, the result is for reading, not for reprinting a brochure.
Can you translate a PDF without losing the format?
Partly, and you should know exactly where the line is. The result is a text-only PDF. It is built for reading, not for design.
What stays the same
- The number of pages, and which content is on which page
- The position of each block of text: a heading at the top of the page stays at the top
- The reading order, so paragraphs follow each other as in the original
What is not carried over
- Photos, logos, charts, stamps and signatures. Images are left out of the translated file.
- Words that are part of a picture, such as labels inside a diagram
- Exact fonts, colours, backgrounds and table borders
- Line breaks. Hindi or German text is often longer than English, so lines will not end where they did in the original.
If you must keep the formatting
No tool that works online can honestly promise to translate a PDF and keep the formatting of a designed brochure. For a layout that matters, use the translation as your draft. Convert the original with PDF to Word, which keeps images and tables, and replace the text with the translated wording there.
Translate PDF to Word or Excel
The translator always gives you a PDF. To translate a PDF to Word, do it in two steps: translate here, then open the result in our PDF to Word converter. Both steps are free, and you end up with an editable .docx in the new language. There is no direct way to translate a PDF into Word in one click, but the two steps take a minute.
To translate a PDF to Excel, be more careful. Table grids are not kept in the translated PDF, so PDF to Excel has to guess the columns from the spacing of the text. For a bank statement or price list, it usually works better the other way round: convert the original to Excel first, and translate only the column headings by hand.
Page limits, waiting time and files that will not translate
A few practical limits keep the service free for everyone.
- 60 pages per file. For a longer document, split the PDF into parts of up to 60 pages, translate each, then join them again with Merge PDF.
- 100 MB per file. Image-heavy files can be made smaller first with the Compress PDF tool.
- The first time anyone uses a language pair, the server has to set it up, which can take a few minutes. Keep the tab open.
- Scanned PDFs contain no real text, so there is nothing to translate. Our OCR reads English, Hindi, Spanish, French and German, so scans in those languages can be prepared first.
- A PDF that asks for a password cannot be read. Remove it with Unlock PDF if you know the password.
How the translation is done, and who sees your file
This is a server tool. Your PDF is uploaded over HTTPS, the text is translated automatically, and the file is deleted right after the result is delivered. No person reads it.
Is this an AI PDF translator?
Yes, in the sense that machine translation is a form of AI: software that has learned from large amounts of translated text. What differs is where it runs. When you translate a PDF with AI here, the engine is open-source and sits on our own server. The text of your document is not sent to any outside AI or translation company. It is not a chatbot, and it does not summarise or rewrite. It translates sentence by sentence.
Is there a PDF translator app, or an offline version?
There is no app to install. The page works as a PDF translator in the browser of an Android phone, an iPhone, a Windows PC, a Mac or a Chromebook. You cannot translate a PDF offline with it, because the translation runs on the server. You need a connection to upload the file and to download the result.
Is there a PDF translator extension for Chrome or Edge?
Not from us, and you do not need one. The translate button built into Edge and Chrome works on web pages; when you open a PDF in the browser it usually does nothing, because a PDF is not a web page. So to translate a PDF with Edge, open this page in a tab, upload the file, and download the translated PDF. There is no extension to add and nothing that watches your browsing.