Translate a Word Document
Get the same document back in another language — every heading, table, list, header, footnote and picture where it was, bold still bold. Nothing is stored, ever.
- Never stored
- No queue, no waiting
- No signup, no watermark
How it works
Add your document
Drop a .docx file onto the page. Its language is recognised for you.
Choose the language
Pick the language to translate into. The first time you use a language, its language data downloads once and is kept for next time.
Translate and download
You get a .docx with the same layout, in the new language, ready to open in Word, Google Docs, Pages or LibreOffice.
Translating the words, and nothing else
A .docx is a ZIP archive of XML, and a paragraph in it is not one string: it is a row of runs, each with its own formatting, interleaved with fields, bookmarks, comment anchors and pictures. Translating the text of a paragraph is the easy half. The hard half is that "The red house" becomes "La casa roja" — the bold word moved — and a tool that translates run by run produces "La rojo casa", grammatically broken, while a tool that translates the paragraph as one string loses the bold.
Here each paragraph is translated whole, with its formatting carried along as markup the translator keeps attached to the words, so the bold lands on "roja", a hyperlink stays on the words it covered, and a footnote reference stays with the sentence it belongs to. Everything that is not text — fields, bookmarks, pictures, comment anchors, line breaks — is lifted out, carried through as a placeholder, and put back as the exact same XML.
The rest of the file is never rewritten. Styles, numbering, section properties, headers, themes and the media folder are copied byte for byte, which is why the result opens like any other document and looks like the original: it is the original, with different words in it.
When you want something else
For a translation someone will sign, publish or rely on medically, use a professional translator — every machine translation, including the big online ones, can produce a fluent sentence that says the wrong thing.
For a very long document where quality matters more than privacy, DeepL and Google Translate's document upload generally translate more idiomatically, particularly for less common language pairs; the trade is that the document goes to their servers, and the free tiers cap size and count.
Frequently asked questions
Is the formatting really kept?
Yes. Only the words change. Fonts, sizes, colours, bold and italic, styles, tables, lists, headers and footers, footnotes, text boxes, pictures, page layout and section breaks are the original document's, untouched. When one sentence mixes formatting — a bold word, a link — the formatting follows the translated word to wherever it lands in the new sentence.
Is my document uploaded or stored?
No. The document is translated here and never sent anywhere, which is the point for contracts, medical letters, CVs and anything else you would not paste into a website. What downloads is language data, the same for everyone, once per language.
How good is the translation?
Good enough to read, understand and work from — it is the machine translation Mozilla built into Firefox, and it is strongest between English and the major European languages. Like every machine translation, it can miss idioms, names and specialist terms, so have a fluent speaker check anything legal, medical or going to print.
Which languages can I translate between?
More than 50, including Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Indonesian and Vietnamese. Any language can be translated into any other: pairs without a direct model go through English, which is automatic.
What stays in the original language?
Field codes (page numbers, dates, a table of contents' instructions), equations, deleted text in tracked changes, and text that is a code, address or number — an invoice number, a web address, an email — are kept exactly. Text inside pictures cannot be translated, because it is not text.
Does it work for Arabic, Hebrew and Asian languages?
Yes. Right-to-left languages get right-to-left paragraphs, and bold, italic and sizes are carried over to the settings Word uses for Arabic, Hebrew and Indian scripts, so the formatting shows up in those scripts too. The text is also marked with its new language, so spell-check and fonts follow it.
Why does the first translation take longer?
The first translation into a language downloads its language data — roughly 15 to 70 MB, shown before you start. It is kept, so the next document in that language starts at once. You can remove the kept data from the page at any time.
Good to know: Legacy .doc files must be saved as .docx first, and password-protected documents need their password removed. Text inside pictures, scanned pages and embedded objects is not translated. A translated sentence may run longer than the original, so a tightly fitted page can reflow. Machine translation is not a certified translation.
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