How to translate a PDF

What you need

The “Translate a PDF” tool uses the translation AI built into Google Chrome, version 138 or later, on a computer. In another browser, or on a phone, PDFRoll asks you to open the site in Chrome.

The first time you use a language pair, for example English → French, Chrome may need to download its translation model. That requires an internet connection and a little disk space; the download progress is shown on screen.

Translate the PDF in 4 steps

1. Open “Translate a PDF” in Chrome on your computer and select the document.
2. Under “Translate to”, choose the target language. No need to specify the original language: it’s detected automatically from the beginning of the document.
3. Click “Translate” and follow the progress, paragraph by paragraph.
4. Download the Word document (.docx): its name ends with the code of the chosen language, for example “_fr”.

A preview of the translated text is also shown on screen. Sixteen target languages are available, including French, English, Spanish, German, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.

What you get

• A fully editable Word document, so you can correct a term or rework a phrase.
• The PDF’s paragraphs and page breaks: each page starts on a new page of the document.
• For each paragraph, a single text size and style, taken from the beginning of the paragraph.

Images and the exact layout aren’t carried over: the tool is meant for understanding and reworking the content, not for producing an identical copy of the original.

When the translation won’t start

• “This PDF contains no text”: the document is a scan. Run it through “OCR PDF” first, then translate the result.
• “This document already seems to be in…”: the detected language is the one you chose. Check the “Translate to” menu.
• The language pair isn’t available: Chrome doesn’t support that combination, and PDFRoll tells you so.
• The model won’t download: check your connection and available disk space, then try again.

Privacy and good habits

The translation happens on your computer: Chrome’s model is downloaded once, then your document is translated locally, without being sent to an online service.

Machine translation can make mistakes: for a legal or official document, have it reviewed before using it. And if you only want the gist of a long document, “Summarize a PDF” is faster.