Translate documents, PDFs, and files online for free while keeping the original formatting. Compare the best free document translation tools and their accuracy.
You have a 47-page PDF contract in German. You need it in English by tomorrow morning. The contract has tables, headers, footers, numbered clauses, and a signature block. You paste it into Google Translate. What comes back is a wall of plain text with zero formatting, clause numbers jumbled, and tables turned into incoherent word salad.
This is the document translation problem in 2026. The translation engines have gotten remarkably good at language. They are still remarkably bad at preserving the thing that makes a document a document: its structure.
I spent the last three weeks testing every major free document translation tool I could find. I translated the same set of test files — a legal contract PDF, a technical manual in DOCX, a financial report with charts, and a simple plain-text README — through each service. I tracked accuracy, formatting preservation, language support, file size limits, and whether the service required signup or uploaded files to remote servers.
Here's what actually works.
Translating a sentence is one problem. Translating a document is a completely different problem layered on top.
When you translate a PDF, the tool needs to:
Step 4 is where everything falls apart. German text is roughly 30% longer than English text for the same content. Japanese text is significantly shorter. Arabic reads right-to-left. When you swap languages, text overflows its boxes, columns misalign, tables break, and page breaks land in the wrong places.
Most free tools skip steps 2 and 4 entirely. They extract, translate, and dump plain text back at you. The tools that try to preserve formatting have varying degrees of success, and that variance is what this guide is about.
Google Translate has a dedicated document translation feature at translate.google.com. You click "Documents," upload a file (DOCX, PDF, PPTX, XLSX), and get a translated version back.
What it does well:
Where it struggles:
Accuracy: Strong for European languages (EN-DE, EN-FR, EN-ES score well in my tests). Weaker for low-resource languages and specialized terminology. Legal and medical documents benefit from post-editing.
Privacy: Files are uploaded to Google servers for processing. Google's privacy policy applies. Not ideal for sensitive documents.
DeepL has earned a reputation for producing more natural-sounding translations than Google for many language pairs, particularly European ones. Their free tier includes document translation.
What it does well:
Where it struggles:
Accuracy: Best-in-class for European language pairs. My legal contract test came back with fewer awkward phrasings than any other tool. Technical terminology handling is impressive.
Privacy: Files are uploaded to DeepL servers. Free tier users' files may be stored temporarily. Pro users get guaranteed deletion.
If you have a Microsoft account (free), you can upload a DOCX to Word Online and use the built-in Translate feature (Review > Translate).
What it does well:
Where it struggles:
Accuracy: Solid across the board. Particularly strong for business and technical documents. The integration with Word means you can immediately edit the output.
Doc Translator at doctranslator.com is specifically built for document translation with formatting preservation. It uses Google Translate's engine under the hood but adds its own formatting layer.
What it does well:
Where it struggles:
Accuracy: Same as Google Translate (it uses Google's API). The value here is in the formatting preservation layer, not the translation quality.
Lingvanex offers document translation with a focus on privacy. They have a web tool, desktop apps, and a self-hosted option.
What it does well:
Where it struggles:
Accuracy: Adequate for getting the gist of a document. Not reliable enough for professional use without heavy post-editing.
| Feature | Google Translate | DeepL | Microsoft Word Online | Doc Translator | Lingvanex |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Languages | 130+ | 33 | 130+ | 130+ (Google engine) | 100+ |
| Free file limit | 10 MB | 5 MB (3 docs/month) | Unlimited (DOCX only) | 1 MB | 5 MB / 50 pages |
| PDF support | Yes (basic) | Limited | No (DOCX only) | Yes (best layout) | Yes |
| DOCX support | Yes | Yes | Yes (native) | Yes | Yes |
| PPTX support | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Formatting quality | Medium | High (DOCX) | Highest (DOCX) | Medium-High (PDF) | Medium |
| Signup required | No | Yes (free account) | Yes (Microsoft account) | No | No (web) |
| Privacy | Cloud upload | Cloud upload | Cloud upload | Cloud upload | Desktop option available |
| Best for | Quick & wide language coverage | European language quality | DOCX with perfect formatting | PDF layout preservation | Privacy-conscious users |
Machine translation has improved dramatically, but the output still needs guidance. Here are practical steps to get better results.
Before you translate, clean up the source document:
This is the single biggest factor most people ignore:
Never treat machine-translated documents as final for important use cases. At minimum:
For the best results with PDF documents, use this workflow:
This pipeline preserves formatting far better than any direct PDF-to-translated-PDF tool because DOCX is an editable format that translation engines can work with natively.
Translating between left-to-right languages (English, German, French) and right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi) introduces layout challenges that no free tool handles perfectly:
For CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) translations, character width differences mean text blocks expand or contract unpredictably. A 10-word English sentence might become 6 Chinese characters, causing tables and text boxes to look empty with large gaps.
The best mitigation: translate to DOCX, manually adjust the layout, then export.
This is the part nobody talks about enough. When you upload a document to any cloud-based translation service, you are sending that document's content to a third party's servers.
For a restaurant menu or a travel blog post, this is fine. For a legal contract, financial statement, medical record, or HR document, think carefully.
What happens to your uploaded files:
For sensitive documents, consider:
Platforms like akousa.net take this approach for their PDF and text processing tools — everything runs in your browser, and your files never leave your device. While akousa.net's tools cover document processing rather than full machine translation, the principle matters: your data stays yours.
Free tools are genuinely useful for:
Free tools are not sufficient for:
For these use cases, use machine translation as a starting point, then invest in professional human review. Many professional translation services now offer "machine translation post-editing" (MTPE) at a fraction of the cost of full human translation. You get the speed of MT with the accuracy of a human eye.
The internet is increasingly multilingual by design. Websites that only serve content in one language are leaving enormous audiences behind.
For context, akousa.net supports 20 languages across its entire platform — English, Turkish, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Polish, Ukrainian, Swedish, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Czech. Every tool, game, and piece of documentation is accessible in all 20 languages. This kind of comprehensive internationalization is becoming the baseline expectation, not a luxury feature.
If you are building or managing a multilingual website, the document translation tools listed above can help with content localization workflows — but they should be one part of a broader internationalization strategy that includes proper locale handling, RTL support, and culturally appropriate content adaptation.
Yes, but with caveats. A scanned PDF is essentially an image, so the translation tool first needs to perform OCR (optical character recognition) to extract the text. Google Translate's document mode handles basic scanned PDFs, but accuracy drops significantly with poor scan quality, handwritten text, or unusual fonts. For best results, run the scanned PDF through a dedicated OCR tool first to get clean text, then translate that text. The formatting from the original scan will almost certainly be lost — plan to reformat manually.
DeepL produces the most natural-sounding translations for European language pairs (English to/from German, French, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and others). For Asian languages, Google Translate has broader coverage and competitive accuracy. For any critical document, no single free tool is sufficient on its own — use the best tool for your language pair and then have a human review the output.
Generally, no. All major free cloud-based translation tools upload your document to their servers for processing. Google, DeepL, and Microsoft all retain data under their respective privacy policies. For confidential documents, consider using offline translation tools (like Lingvanex's desktop app), removing sensitive information before translating, or using professional translation services that offer non-disclosure agreements. Browser-based tools that process files locally using WebAssembly are another privacy-preserving option for the document processing steps of your workflow.
The most reliable method in 2026 is a two-step process: first convert the PDF to DOCX using a quality PDF-to-Word converter, then translate the DOCX file using DeepL or Microsoft Word Online. Both handle DOCX formatting well — headings, tables, lists, and basic styling survive the translation. After translating, export back to PDF. Direct PDF-to-PDF translation (as offered by Google Translate and Doc Translator) works for simple single-column documents but breaks down with complex layouts.
Truly local (offline) document translation is rare in the free tier. Lingvanex offers a desktop application with limited free translations that processes locally. Some experimental browser-based tools are emerging, but these are currently limited in language support and document format handling. For the document processing side, tools like those on akousa.net can help prepare files, but the actual translation step still typically requires a cloud service for production-quality results.
Document translation in 2026 is a solved problem for casual use and an unsolved problem for professional use. The free tools are genuinely impressive — Google Translate and DeepL can get you 85-95% of the way there for many language pairs. The remaining 5-15% is where formatting breaks, context gets lost, and specialized terminology goes wrong.
The practical approach: use the right tool for your file format (DOCX through Word Online or DeepL, PDFs through the convert-then-translate pipeline), pre-process your documents for cleaner input, and always post-edit anything that matters. For sensitive files, think carefully about where your data goes — or use local processing tools wherever possible.
Translation technology is getting better every year. The gap between machine and human translation is narrowing. But it has not closed yet, and for documents where accuracy is non-negotiable, a human reviewer remains essential.
Akousa