PDF translator
Translate a PDF page by page, including scanned pages, with the original beside every translation. Free, no account, and the file itself never leaves your device.
Drop a PDF here
Up to 20 pages. Text PDFs and scanned pages both work.
Two kinds of PDF, two ways of reading them
A PDF made from Word or a website carries a text layer: the words are stored as characters, and PointTranslate extracts them directly in your browser with Mozilla's pdf.js. That is fast and exact.
A scanned PDF is just a picture of paper. There are no characters to extract, so the page is rendered to an image and read by a vision model that also translates it. That is what makes old letters, photographed forms and scanned book pages work.
You can spot the difference yourself: if you can select a word in your PDF viewer, it has a text layer.
Tips for better PDF translations
- Pick the source language for short or technical documents; detection needs a few sentences to be sure.
- Multi-column layouts (journals, newsletters) can interleave columns in the text layer. If a page reads oddly, check the original beside it.
- Tables come through as rows of text. For numbers that matter, compare against the original.
- Need the formatting? If you have the source DOCX or PPTX, use the Word & PowerPoint translator instead.
PDF translator questions
Is this PDF translator free?
Yes, with no sign-up and no watermark. Each file is limited to the first 20 pages and about 40,000 characters so the service stays free for everyone; split a longer PDF into parts if you need more.
Can it translate scanned PDFs?
Yes. Pages with no text layer (scans, photographed pages, image-only exports) are rendered in your browser and read by a vision model, up to 8 scanned pages per file. The page is marked "scanned" so you know which method was used.
Does it keep the PDF layout?
No, and it tells you so up front. PDFs store text as positioned fragments rather than paragraphs, so rebuilding the exact layout in another language (which is usually longer or shorter) is unreliable. You get a clean page-by-page translation next to the original, as text or a printable page. If you have the Word or PowerPoint source file, use the document translator, which does keep formatting.
How do I translate a PDF to English?
Choose English under "To", drop the PDF in, and press Translate. The source language is detected automatically, page by page, so mixed-language PDFs work too.
Is my PDF uploaded?
The PDF itself never leaves your device: it is opened in the browser. Only the extracted text, or an image of a scanned page, is sent to the AI model for translation, and nothing is stored.
Can I use it for a contract, visa or medical report?
Use it to understand what a document is about, not as the version you rely on or submit. Legal, immigration and medical documents need a certified human translation.