Translate a PDF to English

How PDF-to-English translation works here

You drop in the PDF, PDFlee detects the source language automatically, and you confirm English as the target. The tool extracts the embedded text page by page, translates it, and rebuilds each page as a copy of the original with the English text re-flowed into the same positions. Images, charts, signatures and backgrounds stay exactly where they were.

You do not need to know what language the document is in. Detection covers a wide set of languages — including some, like Arabic and Hebrew, that PDFlee cannot translate into but can recognise and name, so you always know where you stand before spending anything.

Pricing is in credits and shown before anything runs: 3 credits per unit on the standard tier, 5 on premium, where a unit is up to 10 pages or 20,000 characters — whichever is larger. Credits are only deducted when the translation succeeds; failures are refunded automatically. New accounts start with 3 free credits, enough to translate a typical document end to end.

Why English is the most common target

Most documents people need translated into English are documents someone else produced: a rental contract from abroad, a foreign invoice for an expense report, an insurance letter, university transcripts, supplier documentation. What matters in those situations is not literary polish — it is that the translated page still looks like the original, so the person you hand it to can compare the two side by side, line by line.

That is the case PDFlee's rebuild approach is designed for. Because each translated page is drawn over a copy of the original, a stamp, table or signature block appears in the translation exactly where it appears in the source — which is what case workers, accountants and admissions offices actually check.

What it handles — and what it honestly does not

English is available as a target on both tiers: standard (3 credits per unit) and premium via DeepL (5 credits per unit) for texts where nuance matters. Longer translations are re-fitted automatically — English is often shorter than the source language, which makes English a forgiving target for layout.

PDFlee translates the text embedded in your PDF. Scanned or photographed documents — where each page is just an image — contain no embedded text, so they cannot be translated here. Run OCR first, then translate the OCR'd file.

Privacy: what happens to your document

Translation is the one PDFlee tool that runs on our server: your document is uploaded over HTTPS for processing and deleted the moment the job finishes, success or failure. Every other PDFlee tool (merge, split, compress and the rest) runs entirely in your browser.

That distinction is stated on every page of this site, because it is the honest version: we never claim translation is local, and we never keep your document after the job is done.