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Translation
Your translation will appear hereChoose the target language, add your text, then press Translate. Click any sentence in the translation for alternatives.
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Free AI Translator: Translate Text and Documents Online
This free AI translator turns text or a document into any of 114 languages. Paste or upload, pick the language, and press Translate: the source language is detected for you. Two controls beside the language picker are what set it apart. A register setting decides whether the result speaks to the reader formally or informally, and a Keep button stops a name or a term from being translated at all. Those are the two places where most machine translation goes wrong. The vocabulary is rarely the problem.
PriceFree, with no sign-up. Up to 800 words per translation as a guest, 1,500 with a free account and 5,000 on Pro.
Languages114 languages in 124 regional variants, from Spanish (Spain) and Portuguese (Brazil) to Tagalog, Cebuano, Urdu and Swahili. The source language is detected automatically.
RegisterMatch source tone, Formal or Informal: usted or tú, Sie or du, vous or tu, po or ka.
FilesPaste text or upload a .docx, .pdf or .txt file up to 25 MB. Download the result as Word, PDF or plain text.
ExtrasKeep names untranslated, get up to three other wordings for any sentence, listen to either side, and translate as you type with Instant.
PrivacyYour text is sent once to make the translation and isn’t stored by us afterwards.
Last updated 29 September 2026 by the AI Writing Assistant team.
How the AI translation works
Three steps, and the third is the one this page is really about.
1
Paste or upload, and it detects the language
Type, paste or drop in a document. The source language is detected automatically, or set it yourself when the text is short enough to be ambiguous.
2
Choose the target and the register
Pick from 114 languages across 124 regional variants, with the variants where they matter: Spanish and Spanish (Spain), Portuguese (Brazil), and English in four variants. Then decide whether the translation should be formal, informal, or match the tone of your source.
3
Read it back, then check it
Listen to either side, translate as you type with Instant, or keep a name exactly as written. If you don’t read the target language, the section below on checking a translation is the part worth your time.
What this AI text translator does that the obvious one doesn’t
A register control that actually changes the grammar
Formal, informal, or match the source. In Spanish that’s the difference between usted and tú. In German it’s Sie or du. It changes verb forms and pronouns all the way through, so it does much more than make the text polite.
Names and terms you can lock
Select a word and press Keep. Brand names, product names, defined terms and anything with a legal meaning stay exactly as you wrote them instead of being helpfully turned into something else.
114 languages, with the variants that matter
Spanish and Spanish (Spain) are different. So are Portuguese (Brazil) and Portuguese, French and French (Canada), and the four Englishes. Picking the variant isn’t pedantry.
Listen to either side
Hear the source or the translation read aloud. For a language you’re learning, or a name you’re about to say out loud on a call, this is more useful than it sounds.
Instant mode
Translate as you type for short pieces, like a message, a phrase or a line you need right now. You don’t have to press anything.
Documents as well as text boxes
Upload a file and translate what is inside it rather than copying it out first.
Set the register before you translate
A translation can be grammatically perfect and socially wrong. The register selector sits next to the language picker because it’s the same size of decision.
Formal, Informal, or Match source tone. Match source tone is the default, for when you’d rather it followed your lead.
In the run shown here, the brand names Northwind and BrightBox Pro came through untouched.
The speaker icon reads the translation aloud. The pencil lets you edit it in place.
Instant mode translates as you type, for anything short.
A real translation, unedited, with the register set to Formal.
114 languages, and the variants inside them
Search rather than scroll. The list separates the regional variants that genuinely behave differently instead of collapsing them into one entry.
Spanish and Spanish (Spain) differ in vocabulary and in the second person plural.
Portuguese (Brazil) and European Portuguese differ enough that using the wrong one is noticeable.
English appears as US, UK, Canadian and Australian, because spelling and punctuation follow the variant.
Recent and common languages sit at the top so the ones you use are one tap away.
The picker, with regional variants listed separately.
The same message, formal and informal
Two real runs of one English support email into Spanish. Only the register changed.
Formal · usted
Gracias por ponerse en contacto con el servicio de asistencia de Northwind. Su BrightBox Pro tiene una garantía de dos años, por lo que sustituiremos la unidad defectuosa sin coste alguno. ¿Podría confirmar su dirección de entrega para que podamos organizar la recogida?
Informal · tú
Gracias por ponerte en contacto con el servicio de asistencia de Northwind. Tu BrightBox Pro tiene una garantía de dos años, así que sustituiremos la unidad defectuosa sin coste alguno. ¿Podrías confirmar tu dirección de entrega para que podamos organizar la recogida?
Four things changed: ponerse to ponerte, Su to Tu, ¿Podría to ¿Podrías, su dirección to tu dirección. Both are correct Spanish. Sending the informal one to a customer you have never met would read as presumptuous in most of the Spanish-speaking world. A general translator wouldn’t have told you that, because it never asked.
Not happy with one sentence? Change only that one
A translation is usually right except for one line that sounds stiff or says slightly the wrong thing. You don’t have to translate the whole text again to fix it.
1
Point at a sentence
Hover over any sentence in the translation and the sentence it came from is highlighted in your original, so you can see exactly which words produced it.
2
Click it for alternatives
Up to three other wordings appear. They are written with the surrounding paragraph in view, so a replacement still fits the sentences around it.
3
Pick one, or retranslate
Click an alternative and it replaces that sentence while the rest stays as it was. Retranslate redoes the whole text with different wording, and you can also edit the result by hand.
Formal or informal: the decision most translators never ask you about
English lost its second-person distinction centuries ago, so English speakers don’t notice they are making this choice. Most of the world’s languages force it on every sentence.
Language
Informal
Formal
Getting it wrong reads as
Spanish
tú
usted
Over-familiar with a customer, cold with a friend
German
du
Sie
A serious breach in business. German keeps the line firmly
French
tu
vous
Presumptuous. Vous is the safe default with strangers
Portuguese
tu / você
o senhor / a senhora
Varies by country as well as by register
Italian
tu
Lei
Too casual in any professional setting
Russian
ты
вы
Rude to an older person or a stranger
Japanese
plain form
keigo (敬語)
Plain form to a client reads as disrespect, which is worse than casual
Korean
반말
해요체 / 합뽼체
Speech level is tied to age and status as well as closeness
A translator with no register control makes this choice for you and doesn’t mention it. That’s why the selector here defaults to Match source tone rather than to either extreme. It’s also why it’s worth setting yourself whenever the reader is a customer, a professor or anyone senior to you.
Names, brands and terms that must not be translated
The classic machine translation failure isn’t a mistranslated sentence. It’s a proper noun that got helpfully converted into a word.
Product and brand names
If your product is called Bright Box, a translator may decide those are two ordinary English words and render them as such. Select the name and press Keep before you translate.
People and places
Surnames that are also common nouns are the usual casualty, and place names are worse. A town whose name looks like a word will sometimes come out the other side as that word.
Defined terms
In a contract or a policy, a term defined once and capitalised thereafter has a specific meaning. Translating it breaks the definition, even when the translation is a perfectly good synonym.
Codes, SKUs and identifiers
Model numbers, reference codes and anything a system will match on. These look like noise to a translator and occasionally get reformatted.
Interface labels
If you’re writing instructions for software whose interface is in English, translating the button names leaves the reader hunting for a button that doesn’t exist.
Units and formats
Dates, decimal separators and measurements follow local convention, so check them after translating. 1,500 means one and a half in some places and fifteen hundred in others.
How to check a translation when you don’t read the language
This is the question people actually have, and right now it’s answered mostly by forum threads. Here is the working method.
Back-translate itPress Use as source under the translation: it moves the result into the input box and sets the target to English, so one more press of Translate shows you what it says. It won’t be elegant, but if the meaning has drifted, this is where you see it. It catches reversals, dropped negatives and confused pronouns reliably.
Check every number, name and date by eyeYou don’t need the language to do this. Confirm the figures, the spelling of names and the date format survived, and that nothing was silently converted.
Count the sentencesIf your source had five sentences and the translation has three, something was merged or dropped. Length differences between languages are normal. Missing sentences aren’t.
Look for your own untranslated wordsOccasional untranslated fragments usually mean the engine couldn’t parse that part. Treat it as a warning sign.
Ask a person for anything that mattersBack-translation catches meaning errors. It won’t tell you the tone is wrong, the register is off, or the phrasing is quietly comic. For a contract, an application or anything public, a native reader is the last step, and it isn’t optional.
Right-to-left languages, and what tends to break
Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu and Kurdish are all supported here. The translation is rarely the problem. How it sits on the page often is.
Numbers run the other way
Digits stay left-to-right inside right-to-left text. That’s correct and it looks wrong to an unfamiliar eye, so resist the urge to fix it.
Latin names inside the line
A brand name in the Latin alphabet inside an Arabic sentence creates a direction change mid-line. Where the surrounding punctuation lands is the thing to check.
Punctuation moves
Arabic uses its own comma (،) and question mark (؟), and they sit at the opposite end of the sentence from where you expect.
Copy and paste is where it goes wrong
Text that renders correctly here can break when pasted into a system that doesn’t handle direction. Check it in the place it will actually be read.
Don’t reverse it yourself
If it looks backwards, it’s almost certainly right and your editor is displaying it correctly. Manually reordering characters is how genuinely broken text gets created.
Urdu and Persian aren’t Arabic
They share the script and differ in letters, vocabulary and grammar. Pick the actual language rather than the one whose alphabet you recognise.
Machine translation isn’t equally good at every language
Most AI translation tools advertise a number of languages and imply they all work the same way. They don’t, and the reason is simply how much text existed to learn from.
The strongest pairsEnglish with Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Dutch. Decades of parallel text, closely related grammar. Output here is genuinely good and usually needs only light editing.
Strong but structurally distantEnglish with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Arabic. Enormous training data, but word order, politeness and what a sentence must specify all differ. Accuracy is high; naturalness varies more.
Thinner groundMany South Asian, South East Asian and African languages. Real support, less material behind it, and more variation in how idiomatic the result feels.
Translating between two non-English languagesOften routed through English on the way, which means two chances to lose something rather than one. Where it matters, translate to English first and check that step yourself.
None of this is a reason to avoid the less-supported pairs. It’s a reason to spend more of your checking effort on them, and to get a person to read the result when the stakes are real.
Translation, localisation and transcreation
Three different jobs, sold interchangeably. Asking for the wrong one is why a perfectly accurate translation sometimes lands badly.
TranslationThe same meaning in another language. The sentence structure follows the source, the content is unchanged, and the measure of success is fidelity. This is what this tool does.
LocalisationTranslation plus everything around it: dates, currency, units, address formats, name order, paper sizes, legal requirements, the examples you chose. A price in dollars and a US phone number are still wrong after a flawless translation.
TranscreationRe-creating the effect rather than the words. A slogan built on a pun, a joke or a headline with rhythm has to be rewritten from the intent, often into something that shares no words with the original. No machine does this, and no translator should try.
Post-editingWhat professionals actually do: machine draft first, human edit second. The editor checks meaning, register, terminology and anything the engine couldn’t know. Nobody retypes the whole thing.
A useful test: if the source text was written to make someone feel something rather than know something, you want transcreation and a person. A translator of any kind won’t do.
When a machine translation isn’t enough
Anything legally binding. Contracts, terms, consent forms, immigration and court documents. Many of these need a certified human translation to be accepted at all, however accurate the text is.
Medical and safety information. Dosage, procedure, warnings. A near-miss in these isn’t a stylistic problem.
Marketing that depends on the wording. Puns, slogans, headlines and jokes survive translation badly. Idiom is the first thing to go, and a literal rendering of a joke is worse than no joke.
Anything published under your name in a language you can’t read. Use the machine to get it close, then have a native speaker read it before it goes out.
Everything else is exactly what this is for, and it’s very good at it. That covers the email, the message, the document you need to understand and the page you want the gist of.
Who the AI translator is for
Working across languages
Answer a supplier in Spanish, read a report in German, send an update your whole team can follow. Set the register once and the tone stays right.
Students
Read a source that was never published in your language, or check your own writing in one you’re still learning. Listen to the result to hear how it should sound.
Everyday messages
Write to family, a landlord, a shop or an office abroad. Use informal for people you know and formal for people you don’t. English lets you ignore that choice. Most languages don’t.
AI translator FAQs
Is this AI translator free?
Yes. You can translate without an account: up to 800 words per translation as a guest, 1,500 with a free account and 5,000 on Pro, which also removes the ads. Every language, the register setting, Keep, alternatives and document upload are on every plan.
How many languages does it translate?
114 languages across 124 regional variants, listed separately where they behave differently. That covers Spanish and Spanish (Spain), Portuguese (Brazil), French (Canada), and English in US, UK, Canadian and Australian forms. The source language is detected automatically unless you set it.
How do I make the translation formal or informal?
Use the register selector next to the language picker. Formal produces usted in Spanish, Sie in German, vous in French and keigo in Japanese. Informal produces tú, du, tu and plain form. Match source tone is the default and follows your original.
How do I stop it translating names and brands?
Select the word in your source text and press Keep. It will be reproduced exactly rather than translated. Worth doing for product names, defined terms in contracts, interface labels and any surname that’s also an ordinary word.
How accurate is AI translation?
Using AI for translation is now good enough on common pairs, such as English with Spanish, French, German or Portuguese, that most edits are about style. For structurally distant pairs the meaning usually survives but the phrasing needs more work. For less-supported languages, treat it as a strong first draft. Anyone claiming uniform accuracy across a hundred languages is describing a marketing line.
How can I check a translation if I don’t speak the language?
Back-translate it. Put the result back through into your own language and read what comes out. It catches reversals, dropped negatives and confused pronouns. Then check the numbers, names and dates by eye, and count the sentences. For anything that matters, a native speaker is the final step.
Is AI translation good enough for legal or medical documents?
No, not on its own. Many legal contexts require a certified human translation before a document is accepted, regardless of how accurate the text is. For medical and safety information the cost of a near-miss is too high. Use it to understand such a document. Don’t use it to produce one.
What is the difference between translation, localisation and transcreation?
Translation carries the same meaning into another language. Localisation also adapts dates, currency, units, formats and legal requirements. Transcreation re-creates the effect of slogans, puns and headlines, often producing something that shares no words with the original. Only the first is a machine job.
Does it handle Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu?
Yes, including right-to-left text. Two things to check after translating: numbers stay left-to-right inside right-to-left text, which is correct even though it looks odd, and Latin-script names inside the line can move the punctuation around. Check the result where it will actually be read.
Why does the same tool translate some languages better than others?
Because there’s far more parallel text between English and Spanish than between English and, say, Burmese. Quality follows the material available. The length of the language list says nothing about it. Translating between two non-English languages is often routed through English, giving two chances to lose something rather than one.
What does machine translation lose?
Idiom first, then humour, wordplay and cultural reference. Deliberate ambiguity as well. A source that was vague on purpose usually comes back specific. And register, unless you set it, which is why the selector is there.
Can I translate a PDF or Word document?
Yes. Upload a .docx, .pdf or .txt file up to 25 MB and the text is read out of it and translated. Old .doc files need to be saved as .docx first. Download the result as a Word document, a PDF or plain text. The layout of the original file isn’t rebuilt, and translated text often runs longer or shorter than the original, so check headings and tables afterwards.
Can I hear the translation read aloud?
Yes, on both sides. Useful for a name you’re about to say on a call, or for hearing how a phrase should sound in a language you’re learning.
Is artificial intelligence translation the same as older machine translation?
Not quite. Older systems translated phrase by phrase against statistical tables. Artificial intelligence translation reads the whole passage before writing, which is why register, pronouns and sentence order come out far better. It also changed the failure mode: instead of obvious nonsense you now get fluent text that can be quietly wrong.
Should a human still check the result?
For anything published, signed or sent to someone who matters, yes. Professional practice is a machine draft plus a human edit. The editor checks meaning, register and terminology instead of retyping. That’s the sensible way to use this tool too.
How many words can I translate at once?
Up to 800 words per translation as a guest, 1,500 with a free account and 5,000 on Pro. The counter under the editor shows how many words you have entered against your limit. For a longer document, translate it in parts, or upload the file and work through it section by section.
Can I get a different wording for just one sentence?
Yes. Click any sentence in the translation and up to three alternatives appear, written with the surrounding text in view. Click one to swap it in. The rest of the translation stays as it was. Retranslate redoes the whole text if you would rather start again.
What is the best AI translator?
For everyday text in a common language pair, most current AI translators produce usable results, so the differences are in the controls. Look for a formal or informal setting, a way to keep names untranslated, alternatives for a single sentence, and document upload. All four are here, free. For anything legal, medical or published under your name, the best translator is still a qualified person checking the machine draft.
What happens to the text I paste in?
It’s sent in order to produce the translation and isn’t stored as text afterwards. Your work is saved in your own browser. See the privacy policy for the detail.
The rest of the toolkit
Check the source before you translate it, summarise a long document in its own language first, or shift the register of your English draft before it goes anywhere. One plan covers all of them.
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