Auto-detect · compare engines · alternatives & dictionary · side-by-side view · glossary · translate .docx, .srt, .csv, .md · conversation mode · no account
This free online translator turns text from one language into another right in your browser. Type or paste any length of text — long texts are split at sentence boundaries — leave the source language on Auto-detect (or choose it yourself), pick a target language, and the translation appears as you type. There is nothing to install and no account to create — just a fast, clean, ad-free way to translate words, sentences, messages and paragraphs whenever you need them.
The most-searched translations are a click away. Set them with the searchable language menus or the quick-language buttons, then swap the direction any time with the ⇄ button:
.txt file.Ctrl+Enter to translate, Alt+S to swap languages, Ctrl+D to copy.Travellers translate signs, menus and directions; students check grammar and build vocabulary while learning a new language; professionals draft emails, product descriptions and support replies for international colleagues and customers; and anyone can quickly understand a message, social-media post or article written in another language. For tasks beyond plain text, explore the other free utilities at jasperbernaers.com/apps, including a PDF toolkit and a text cleaner.
Any length: long texts are split at sentence boundaries. 🎤 Dictate types for you, and Documents translates .docx, .srt, .csv and more.
Leave the source on Auto-detect or search the dropdowns. ⇄ or Alt+S swaps the direction.
⚖ Compare shows every engine side by side, Alternatives offers other wordings, and ↺ Check translates back so you can see if the meaning survived.
🔊 Listen uses your device’s voices; romanization appears for non-Latin scripts.
☆ Save keeps a phrase in your phrasebook, Ctrl+D copies, and a share link carries your text in the URL, so treat it like the text itself.
This page is a lightweight front end for quick text translation: auto-detect, text-to-speech, romanization, local history and share links, without ads or an account. Below: which engine translates your text, its limits, how to get better results, where machine translation goes wrong, and what happens to your text.
Over 100 languages — from widely spoken ones like English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi and Turkish, to smaller and regional ones. Pick source and target from the searchable dropdowns, or use the quick-language buttons. Leave the source on Auto-detect and it identifies the input language for you, and ⇄ swap (or Alt+S) reverses the direction in one click.
It is a lighter, ad-free front end for quick text translation — no account, no cookie banner, no upsell, just a clean two-pane screen with auto-detect, text-to-speech, romanization, history and shareable links. If you need to translate whole documents or images, or want the very widest coverage, Google Translate or DeepL will serve you better. For fast copy-and-paste text, this stays out of your way.
Very accurate for everyday text — emails, messages, social posts, product descriptions and general communication, especially between major European languages. Idioms, slang, wordplay and highly technical, legal or medical content still need a human check, so review anything where a mistranslation would matter. Because results appear as you type, you can rephrase the source and watch how the translation changes, which is often the fastest way to get a cleaner result.
Yes for most everyday needs — emails, website copy, marketing text, support replies and internal notes. For legally binding contracts, regulatory filings, or medical and safety-critical documents where an error carries real liability, have a professional translator sign off. And note the privacy point below: your text is sent to a translation service, so do not paste confidential material.
Yes, for text-based files. Switch to Documents and drop a .docx, .srt, .vtt, .csv, .tsv, .md, .txt, .html or .json file. Only the text is translated: subtitle timestamps, spreadsheet columns you did not select, Markdown syntax, code, links and Word paragraph styles stay as they were, and you download a file in the same format. For PDFs use the PDF translator; images are not supported.
Yes. Copy (or Ctrl+D) grabs the result, Export downloads it as a .txt file, and Share link builds a URL that reopens the tool with your text and language pair already filled in — useful for sending a translation to someone else. Recent translations stay in your history so you can go back to them.
With the Google or MyMemory engine, your text is sent to that online service, so do not paste passwords, personal data, medical details or confidential material. With the On-device engine (recent Chrome or Edge on desktop) the translation runs locally after a one-time model download, so the text stays on your computer. History, phrasebook, glossary and settings are stored in your browser only. Voice input uses your browser\'s speech recognition, which in some browsers sends audio to the browser maker.
Very. Translate a phrase in both directions to see how meaning and word order shift, press 🔊 Listen to hear it spoken, and turn on romanization to read non-Latin scripts in the Latin alphabet. Your history doubles as a vocabulary list of everything you looked up.
You choose. Auto uses Google\'s public translation endpoint with MyMemory as automatic fallback. You can also pick one of them directly, or On-device, which uses the translation model built into recent Chrome and Edge, so your text never leaves your computer. ⚖ Compare runs them all on the same text and shows how much they agree. Nothing here is a home-grown model: this page is the front end, not the translator.
Almost always a rate limit. The free endpoints throttle heavy use from one address, and the page falls back to the second engine when that happens. Wait half a minute and try again, translate in smaller chunks, or reload. A failed translation is never silent — you will see an error rather than a wrong answer.
Because machine-translation models are updated continuously, and the fallback engine can produce different wording from the primary one. Neither is wrong; they are different systems trained on different data. If you need a translation to stay fixed — for published copy, say — save the output rather than relying on regenerating it later.
There is none in the tool itself. Long texts are split at paragraph and sentence boundaries, translated part by part and joined again with your line breaks intact; the status bar shows how many parts were needed. The free engines do limit heavy use, so very long texts or big documents can slow down or stop halfway — wait a minute and continue, or switch engine.
Yes — translation is debounced, so it fires shortly after you stop typing rather than on every keystroke. That is what makes rephrasing so useful: change one word in the source and the result updates, so you can feel out which phrasing translates cleanly.
The engine infers the language from the text itself and shows what it decided. It is reliable on a full sentence and much less so on a single word — gift is English for a present and German for poison, and there is no way to tell which from one word. Short input, heavily mixed languages, or text that is mostly names and numbers are the cases where you should set the source language manually.
Romanization writes a non-Latin script in the Latin alphabet so you can pronounce it — Chinese 你好 becomes nǐ hǎo, Japanese ありがとう becomes arigatō, Russian спасибо becomes spasibo. It appears automatically when the target uses a non-Latin script. It is a pronunciation aid, not a second translation, and different romanization systems exist for the same language.
Yes — 🔊 Listen uses your device's built-in speech synthesis, so the available voices come from your operating system rather than from this page. Quality varies a lot by language and platform: major languages sound natural on most modern systems, while less common ones may have no installed voice at all, in which case nothing plays. Installing additional language voices in your OS settings fixes it.
In your browser's local storage on this device only. It is not synced, not uploaded and not visible to anyone else, and clearing your browser data removes it. Use Clear history to wipe it deliberately — worth doing on a shared or public computer, since the entries are readable by anyone using that browser profile.
Your source text and the two language codes, encoded into the URL itself. That means the text is visible in the link — so treat a share link exactly like the text it carries, and do not send one containing anything sensitive. Anyone opening it gets the tool preloaded with your text, and the translation runs on their device.
Yes: Ctrl+Enter translates now, Alt+S swaps the languages, Ctrl+D copies the result, Alt+M starts dictation, Alt+C compares engines, Alt+V toggles the side-by-side view, Alt+P saves to the phrasebook and Alt+L reads the translation aloud. The language menus are searchable and work with the arrow keys and Enter.
Feed it complete sentences with normal punctuation — machine translation leans heavily on grammatical context, and a fragment gives it nothing to work with. Avoid idioms if the meaning matters, spell out ambiguous pronouns, and split long paragraphs. If a result reads oddly, rewrite the source more plainly and translate again; you will usually fix it in one pass.
Usually not — modern engines translate directly between most pairs, and routing through English adds a second chance to lose nuance. The exception is genuinely rare pairs, where the engine may already be pivoting through English internally. If a direct result looks wrong, translating each direction separately and comparing is a reasonable diagnostic.
Back-translate it: paste the result into the source box and translate it back. If it returns roughly your original meaning, the translation is probably sound; if it comes back garbled, something was lost. It is not proof — a wrong translation can back-translate cleanly — but it catches the majority of serious errors.
Because English does not mark the distinction, so the engine has to guess. German du and Sie, French tu and vous, Spanish tú and usted all carry a politeness level that English simply lacks. If it matters, check the output and adjust manually — this is one of the most common ways machine translation goes subtly wrong in professional email.
Yes — Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu translate normally and display in the correct direction. Romanization is offered for them too. The one thing to watch is copying RTL text into a system that does not handle bidirectional text well, where punctuation can appear to jump to the wrong end of the line.
Emoji pass through untouched. Code and markup are riskier: the engine may translate words inside tags, attributes or string literals, which quietly breaks them. If you need to translate a UI string table or an HTML page, translate only the human-readable text and leave the surrounding syntax alone.
For understanding something, generally yes. For publishing something, generally no. The gap is not vocabulary — it is register, cultural context, brand voice and the ability to notice that a literal translation, while correct, would land badly. A common professional workflow is machine translation followed by a human edit, which is faster than translating from scratch and much better than raw output.
Increasingly little. Today's machine translation is neural — the same broad family of models behind large language models — so the old distinction between statistical translation and AI has mostly dissolved. General-purpose AI chat tools can do more with an instruction ("translate this formally, for a legal audience") but a dedicated translation engine is faster and more consistent for straight text.
Broadly, those with the least training data. Major European and East Asian languages are excellent because decades of parallel text exist. Low-resource languages — many African, Central Asian and indigenous languages — are noticeably weaker, and languages with rich morphology or very free word order are harder still. Treat output in a low-resource language as a rough draft.
That depends on the upstream provider's policy, not on this page, and it is a fair question to ask of any free translation service. MyMemory in particular is explicitly a translation memory — it is built on stored translations. This is the practical reason for the advice above: keep confidential material out of any free online translator, including this one.
For your own emails, listings, descriptions and marketing copy, yes — nobody claims copyright on machine output of your input. Two caveats worth knowing: you have no rights to the source text if it was not yours to begin with, and for anything customer-facing you should have a fluent speaker read it before it goes out.
Yes. The two panes stack on small screens, the language pickers are searchable rather than long scrolling lists, and Listen uses the phone's own speech engine. It works fine as a travel translator provided you have a connection — the translation itself happens online, so it will not help you offline abroad.
There is a partial one. Recent Chrome and Edge include an on-device translation model: pick On-device as engine and, once the language pair is downloaded, translation keeps working without sending text anywhere. Other browsers do not offer this yet, and the online engines remain better for rare languages and long, complex text.
Add a term and the translation it must always get, such as a product name or job title, or leave the translation empty to keep the word as it is. Before your text goes to the engine, each term is replaced by a placeholder that engines leave alone, and afterwards your chosen translation is put back. It works for text, documents and conversation, and you can import or export the list as CSV.
Each person taps their own 🎤 Speak button and talks in their language. The speech is turned into text by your browser, translated, shown as a chat bubble and read aloud for the other person. Tap ⛶ show to fill the screen with the translation, handy at a counter or in a taxi. You can also type instead of speaking.
Compare sends the same text to every engine and shows how similar the results are: when they agree, the translation is usually safe. Alternatives lists other wordings for phrases the engine was unsure about; click one to swap it in. Check translates the result back into the source language and scores how close it is to what you wrote.
Working on a longer text? Draft and polish it in the free online notepad — one tab per language, a live word count and autosave in your browser, so nothing is lost between translations.