How to Translate a PDF and Keep Its Layout
You have a document in another language, a product manual, a letter from a company abroad or a syllabus, and want to read it in your own language without pasting it into a translation site paragraph by paragraph. You can translate the whole PDF at once and get it back as a PDF with the same design. Here's how, and what to expect from the result.
How to translate a PDF
- Open Translate PDF and choose the file.
- Under "Translate to", pick the language. The source language is detected automatically.
- Leave "Keep original layout" on "Yes" and click translate.
- Download the translated PDF. A document of a few pages usually takes under a minute.
It works between Hebrew, English, Arabic, Russian, French, German and Spanish, in either direction.
What happens to the design
With layout kept, every translated line goes back where the original line was, in the same colour, size and weight (a bold heading stays bold). Images, logos and lines don't move. Right-to-left languages are written right to left, with numbers, prices and English abbreviations kept in the right order inside them.
A translation can come out shorter or longer than the original. When it is longer, the text is scaled down slightly to fit the same box. If the result looks cramped, for example in a table with small cells, run it again with "No, plain text" for a clean, easy-to-read document.
Which PDFs work
The tool translates real text. To check, try selecting a word in the PDF. If you can, you're fine. If the file is a scan or a photo, it has no text to translate: run it through OCR first, choose "Searchable PDF" as the output, and translate the result.
How accurate is it
Translation is done by a language model, not word by word, so sentences read naturally and names of people, products and dishes are written out rather than "translated". For everyday documents, such as letters, instructions or articles, the result is good enough to understand everything and act on it.
Official documents, such as certificates, court rulings or papers you submit to an authority, need a certified translator and sometimes a notary. There's more in translating an official document: when machine translation is enough.
Privacy
The text is sent to a translation service to be translated, and files are deleted from our server after one hour. Full details, including the provider, are in the privacy policy. If the document contains an ID or account number that doesn't need translating, you can black it out first with Redact PDF.
A special case: restaurant menus
Menus have their own page, Translate a restaurant menu, which explains what happens to dish names, prices and allergy marks.