How to Translate a PDF Document into Another Language

Free translators usually stop at a few thousand characters, which is a page or two of a PDF. To translate a whole document, do it in two steps: get the text out with PDF to Text, then paste it into the AI Translator, which handles documents of 50,000 characters and more and keeps every paragraph, line break and list exactly where it was.

Step 1: Get the text out of the PDF

1. Open PDF to Text and add the PDF.
2. Choose Paragraphs, so lines are joined into proper paragraphs. (Translators work much better on whole sentences than on chopped-up lines.)
3. Click Copy text, or download the .txt file.

If the PDF is a scan — you can't select its text — use PDF OCR instead, choosing the document's language, and copy the result.

Step 2: Translate the text

1. Open the AI Translator.
2. Paste the text, or open the .txt file you downloaded.
3. Choose the languages. It starts on English to Chinese (Simplified); more than seventy languages work in either direction.
4. The translation fills in on the right as it's ready — long documents are translated in parallel sections, and the first part usually arrives within seconds.
5. Copy the translation or download it as a text file. The speaker button reads it aloud.

Hover over an English word (or tap it on a phone) to see a dictionary card with its meaning in context, pronunciation and synonyms — useful when checking a translation.

Why the formatting survives

The translator never asks the AI to "please keep the formatting". Your text is split into lines in your browser, and blank lines, indents, bullet markers, numbers and lines without words stay behind. Only the prose is sent, and each translated piece is slotted back into its original place. The result has the same lines, paragraphs and list structure as the original.

Step 3 (optional): Make a PDF again

• Latin-alphabet languages (French, Spanish, German, Portuguese…): paste the translation into the Text to PDF option of the PDF Converter to get a simple, clean PDF.
• Other scripts (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, Cyrillic…): paste the translation into Word, Google Docs or Pages and save or download it as PDF. These apps have fonts for every script; the converter's standard PDF font only covers Latin letters.

The new PDF won't reproduce the original's design — columns, images and fonts — because only the text was translated. For a faithful design in another language, the original designer needs to place the translated text into the layout.

Just need the gist?

If you only need to understand a foreign-language document rather than translate all of it, the AI PDF Summarizer can summarize it directly in your language — a much quicker route for reports and articles.

Privacy and limits

• What's sent: the text you translate is sent to the translation service to be translated and isn't stored. The layout handling and session memory stay in your browser. Avoid it for documents you're not allowed to share with outside services.
• Free allowance: each browser gets a daily allowance of translated characters, shown under the boxes. Repeated lines and unchanged text don't count again.
• Accuracy: machine translation is very good but occasionally wrong. For legal, medical or published documents, have a fluent reader check it.

Frequently asked questions

Can I upload the PDF to the translator directly?

The translator works with text. Extracting the text first takes a few seconds and gives you a cleaner result, because tables of contents, page numbers and headers can be removed before translating.

What about tables?

Tables come out as lines of text. For spreadsheets of numbers, translate just the labels, or convert the table with the PDF to Excel option of the Universal Document Converter and translate the cells you need.

Can I translate speech instead?

Yes — the AI Live Voice Translator translates speech from your microphone or a video in real time.