Whether you've received a contract in Spanish, an academic paper in French, or a manual in German, copying every paragraph into a translator one by one is no fun. PDFly handles the whole document at once and returns the English version with the layout intact.
Free accounts can translate the first page of any PDF in over 30 languages. For longer documents — or to download a translated PDF that preserves the original formatting — you'll need a Premium account.
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Step 1 — Open the Translate tool
Open the Translate tool. You'll see the upload screen titled "Translate PDF".
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Step 2 — Upload your PDF
Click "Select PDF File" and pick the PDF you want translated. PDFly accepts any selectable-text PDF — scanned documents will need OCR first.
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Step 3 — Confirm English as the target language
In the sidebar on the right, check that the target language is set to "English". PDFly auto-selects it based on your interface language; click the dropdown if you need to change it.
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Step 4 — Click Translate
Click the "Translate" button. PDFly extracts the text and sends it to the translation engine — usually a few seconds for a one-page document.
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Step 5 — Download or copy the English text
When the translation is ready, the English text appears alongside the original. Click "Download as Text" to save it as a plain-text file, or upgrade to download a fully formatted PDF.
When this is useful
The most common cases are a foreign-language contract you need to review before signing, a research paper in a language you don't read fluently, or a product manual you've ordered from abroad. In all of these, you want the meaning across — not a perfect publication-ready translation.
PDFly's free tier covers exactly that: paste a single page in, get back English you can read, copy, or quote. For longer documents — academic papers, books, multi-page contracts — Premium handles the whole document and gives you back a PDF that preserves the original layout.
If you're translating something with sensitive content (legal agreements, medical reports), the desktop app is worth knowing about — it processes everything locally on your computer.
What languages can I translate from?
PDFly supports the major European languages out of the box: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Czech, and Russian. Plus Asian languages including Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), and Arabic.
Source language is auto-detected — you don't have to tell PDFly what language the PDF is in. The engine figures it out, then translates to the target you select.
If your PDF mixes languages (e.g. an English paper with French quotations), the translator handles each fragment in context. Quality is best when the document is mostly one language.
Free vs. Premium — what changes
Free: translate the first page of any PDF, copy or download as plain text, supports all 30+ languages. Best for short documents and one-off translations.
Premium: translate the entire document up to ~50 pages per file. Two output modes — plain text and a fully formatted PDF that preserves headers, tables, and page breaks from the original. Worth it if you regularly work with foreign-language documents.
If you only need this occasionally, the free tier is genuinely useful. If a translated PDF that you can hand back to someone matters, that's where Premium pulls its weight.
