Is the Akkadian document translator free?

You can try it free, with no account needed, and signing in gives you a larger daily allowance. Pro and Scholar are there for longer documents and regular use.

Can it read a photo of a tablet or of the Hammurabi stele?

Not reliably. Wedges are three-dimensional and change with the light, tablets are curved and chipped, and the text continues on faces the photo does not show. The stele’s monumental signs are large but archaizing, and its text is arranged in columns that a photo captures at an angle. What can work is the formulaic and the familiar: a Nebuchadnezzar brick, a standard royal titulary, a well-known law. For anything else, upload the hand copy, the transliteration or the normalization from the publication; nearly every text people ask about has one, and those are read far better than the clay.

How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?

Fast gives a rough sense of what a clean transliteration or normalized text says. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the tier for Akkadian, where Sumerograms have to be read as the Akkadian words they stand for, the preterite, durative, perfect and stative kept apart, subordinate clauses followed to their final -u, and the measures, year names and eponyms of letters and contracts handled correctly. It is still an aid to reading and not a substitute for a critical edition, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary or a published scholarly translation, and any line you will cite should be checked against one.

Will the translation keep my document’s original layout?

The translator produces a translated PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel or EPUB file that aims to preserve the original layout, including tables, columns and headers. Text size, fonts and line breaks may change, so review the result against the original. Editions that print transliteration, normalization and translation in parallel are where the layout is most likely to shift.

Babylonian or Assyrian? Which dialect and period does it handle?

All of the main ones, from the same transliteration conventions: Old Akkadian, Old, Middle and Neo-Babylonian, Old, Middle and Neo-Assyrian, and the Standard Babylonian literary dialect used from the late second millennium on. The dialect shows on the page, since Assyrian vowel harmony, Old Assyrian orthography and the loss of mimation in later Babylonian are all visible in the spelling, and the translation follows the text it is given. Peripheral Akkadian, from Amarna, Nuzi, Ugarit or Hattusa, follows its own local habits and is where results are least even and an expert’s reading matters most.

Can it translate English into Akkadian?

Yes, as composition. A short exercise sentence, a motto or a dedication in the style of a royal inscription comes out in normalized Akkadian; say which dialect you want, since grammars teach Old Babylonian and inscriptions imitate Standard Babylonian. Akkadian is reconstructed from a closed corpus, so anything you will publish, teach from or have inscribed should be checked by an Assyriologist. Treat the output as a draft that follows attested vocabulary and word order, not as an ancient text.

What file types and transliteration conventions can I upload?

PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX (PowerPoint), XLSX (Excel) and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned pages as JPG, PNG or HEIC. Transliteration with diacritics and index numbers, normalization with macrons and circumflexes, the ASCII style of CDLI’s ATF files (sz, s,, t,) and typed Unicode cuneiform are all readable. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters.

Akkadian PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Akkadian

Translate English to Akkadian or Akkadian to English while preserving your document’s layout. Upload your file, choose the target language, and get a natural translation that keeps the meaning of the original.

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See “Keep formatting” in action

Real examples of the “Keep formatting” option: original on the left, translated document on the right. Click either page to enlarge.

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A civil complaint filed in Mexico City, Spanish to English. Caption block, numbered pleadings, the evidence table and the signature block all keep their places. — Original — A civil complaint filed in Mexico City, Spanish to English. Caption block, numbered pleadings, the evidence table and the signature block all keep their places.

An Italian birth certificate, photographed rather than scanned. The framed masthead, the field grid, the marginal annotations and the round seal all hold their positions. — Original — An Italian birth certificate, photographed rather than scanned. The framed masthead, the field grid, the marginal annotations and the round seal all hold their positions.

A handwritten archaeological field notebook from 1974. The engine reads the hand and keeps the ruled inventory table intact. — Original — A handwritten archaeological field notebook from 1974. The engine reads the hand and keeps the ruled inventory table intact.

A handwritten archaeological field notebook from 1974. The engine reads the hand and keeps the ruled inventory table intact. — Translation — A handwritten archaeological field notebook from 1974. The engine reads the hand and keeps the ruled inventory table intact.

A German hospital discharge summary. Diagnoses with ICD codes, lab values and the medication table survive the translation unchanged. — Original — A German hospital discharge summary. Diagnoses with ICD codes, lab values and the medication table survive the translation unchanged.

A German hospital discharge summary. Diagnoses with ICD codes, lab values and the medication table survive the translation unchanged. — Translation — A German hospital discharge summary. Diagnoses with ICD codes, lab values and the medication table survive the translation unchanged.

A 1747 parish baptism register in Latin. Ruled columns, godparents and marginal notes stay aligned, so the genealogy still reads as a register. — Original — A 1747 parish baptism register in Latin. Ruled columns, godparents and marginal notes stay aligned, so the genealogy still reads as a register.

A 1747 parish baptism register in Latin. Ruled columns, godparents and marginal notes stay aligned, so the genealogy still reads as a register. — Translation — A 1747 parish baptism register in Latin. Ruled columns, godparents and marginal notes stay aligned, so the genealogy still reads as a register.

A scanned 17th-century Italian index of sermons. Two columns of dense small print, translated in place. — Original — A scanned 17th-century Italian index of sermons. Two columns of dense small print, translated in place.

A scanned 17th-century Italian index of sermons. Two columns of dense small print, translated in place. — Translation — A scanned 17th-century Italian index of sermons. Two columns of dense small print, translated in place.

How Akkadian documents come out

Read Akkadian in English from a transliteration, a normalized text, a hand copy or a scanned edition, or turn a short English text into Akkadian for an exercise. People bring Old Babylonian letters and the laws of Hammurabi, Gilgamesh and the other Standard Babylonian literature, Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and state letters, and the exercises of an Akkadian grammar, all in the conventions of Assyriology: Sumerograms in capitals, syllabic spellings in lowercase with hyphens, determinatives in superscript and brackets for damage. English to Akkadian is composition, fine for a phrase and in need of an expert for anything to be published or displayed.

Akkadian was written in the cuneiform it inherited from Sumerian, as a mix of syllabic signs and Sumerian logograms, so a printed page of Akkadian is a text in two layers. Transliteration gives the signs: šar-ru-um spelled out, or LUGAL as a Sumerogram to be read as the Akkadian word šarrum, often with a phonetic complement and with determinatives in superscript (d before a god, ki after a place, m before a man’s name, f before a woman’s). Normalization gives the words as reconstructed, with macrons for long vowels, circumflexes for contracted ones (ibnû), the emphatics ṣ and ṭ, the fricative ḫ, š and the glottal stop. Grammars and editions usually print both; ASCII files from CDLI and ORACC write sz, s, and t, for š, ṣ and ṭ. The dialects and periods look different on the page: Old Babylonian keeps mimation (šarrum, bēlum) and Old Assyrian letters from Kültepe use a small sign repertoire, while later Babylonian drops the final -m and Neo-Assyrian scribes write the standardized forms of the royal libraries. The Hammurabi stele is carved in an archaizing monumental script in vertical columns, unlike the tablets of its own period. Unicode cuneiform renders every period in one glyph style, and photographs of tablets show wedges as shadows, so the transliteration and normalization in a published edition are the layers to upload.

Translate your document and keep its structure

The translator keeps your file’s structure while translating the text in context. The downloaded format depends on the source file.

PDFs and scanned pages: The translated PDF follows the page visually, with translated pages rendered as images. Selectable PDF text and identical fonts are not guaranteed.
Word documents and PowerPoint presentations: Start with DOCX or PPTX when you have it. Native paragraphs, table text and slide text can stay editable in the corresponding file format. Translated text inside pictures remains image content; review text wrapping and font changes in your editor.
Excel workbooks and EPUB books: Use the original XLSX or unprotected EPUB for a translated workbook or ebook. Review formulas, numbers and text cells in a workbook; check chapter order, navigation and text flow in your ebook reader.

What people translate to and from Akkadian

Laws, letters and contracts of the Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian periods

The laws of Hammurabi (about 1750 BCE, on the stele now in the Louvre) are the Akkadian text most people meet first, and the casuistic šumma awīlum clauses that structure them recur in the laws of Ešnunna and in countless contracts. Letters from Mari and from the Old Assyrian merchant colony at Kaneš (Kültepe), loan documents, sale contracts with witness lists and oaths, and the exercises built on them in Huehnergard’s grammar are the everyday Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian material. Roth’s Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor is the published reference for the laws; a translation here is a working aid, not a replacement for it.

Standard Babylonian literature

The Epic of Gilgamesh in its Standard Babylonian version and the Old Babylonian Penn and Yale tablets, Enūma eliš, Atra-ḫasīs, Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, the Poem of Erra and Ištar’s Descent are read from transliteration and normalization in editions such as George’s Gilgamesh and Lambert’s Babylonian Creation Myths, or from the transliterations on ORACC. The literary dialect is archaizing, with rare vocabulary, poetic word order and parallelism, so it is where the Advanced tier earns its place and where the published translations of George and of Foster’s Before the Muses remain the reference for any line you will cite.

Royal inscriptions, state archives and diplomatic letters

Neo-Assyrian annals and prisms (Sennacherib’s Taylor Prism, the inscriptions of Ashurnasirpal II and Ashurbanipal), Nebuchadnezzar’s building inscriptions, and the letters, queries and treaties of the State Archives of Assyria are published in transliteration on ORACC (RINAP, RIBo, SAA) and in print. The titulary formulae are repetitive and reliable; the letters are terse and full of court shorthand. The Amarna letters, the fourteenth-century diplomatic correspondence found in Egypt, are a special case: the scribes of Canaan wrote a hybrid Akkadian with West Semitic grammar that specialists still argue over, so readings there should be checked against Moran’s or Rainey’s edition.

Cuneiform documents: photos, hand copies and sign lists

Grammars, coursework and the Sumerian layer

Akkadian courses run on Huehnergard’s A Grammar of Akkadian, Caplice’s Introduction to Akkadian, Worthington’s Complete Babylonian and the Miller and Shipp Akkadian Handbook, with the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the Concise Dictionary of Akkadian and von Soden’s Akkadisches Handwörterbuch as the dictionaries. Students upload exercise sets, paradigm tables and lexicon pages, and the translator reads transliteration and normalization alike. Because so much Akkadian writing is Sumerograms, and because bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian texts, lexical lists and incantations move between the two languages, the Sumerian page covers the other half of a bilingual.

Sumerian documents

What to watch for in Akkadian document translation

The Sumerograms are the first trap: LUGAL in an Akkadian text is šarru, king, and ᵈ30 is the moon god Sîn, ᵈ15 Ištar and ᵈ20 Šamaš, so a reader that pronounces the Sumerian or the number instead of the Akkadian word has already gone wrong. The verb is the second. Akkadian distinguishes preterite, durative, perfect and stative (iprus, iparras, iptaras, paris), marks subordinate clauses with a final -u, adds a ventive -am that is not the accusative, and puts the verb at the end of the clause, so a gloss that reads the forms as English tenses turns a letter’s sequence of events inside out. Case endings and mimation (šarrum, šarrim, šarram) fade in later periods, which is how a text’s date shows in its spelling. Vowel length distinguishes words and is only visible in normalization; Assyrian vowel harmony (Babylonian iṣbatū, Assyrian iṣbutū) and Old Assyrian spellings look like errors to a reader trained on Babylonian. Numbers are sexagesimal and come with measures (GUR, SÌLA, MA.NA for the mina, GÍN for the shekel); dates are year names in Old Babylonian texts and līmu eponyms in Assyria; names are sentences (Sîn-lēqi-unninni, Aššur-bāni-apli) that should be transliterated, not translated. Legal texts hang on the word šumma, if, and on formulae of oath and penalty. Square and half brackets mark what the tablet has lost, and a fluent translation of a bracketed passage is fluent guessing.

Akkadian document translation FAQ

Is the Akkadian document translator free?: You can try it free, with no account needed, and signing in gives you a larger daily allowance. Pro and Scholar are there for longer documents and regular use.
Can it read a photo of a tablet or of the Hammurabi stele?: Not reliably. Wedges are three-dimensional and change with the light, tablets are curved and chipped, and the text continues on faces the photo does not show. The stele’s monumental signs are large but archaizing, and its text is arranged in columns that a photo captures at an angle. What can work is the formulaic and the familiar: a Nebuchadnezzar brick, a standard royal titulary, a well-known law. For anything else, upload the hand copy, the transliteration or the normalization from the publication; nearly every text people ask about has one, and those are read far better than the clay.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Fast gives a rough sense of what a clean transliteration or normalized text says. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the tier for Akkadian, where Sumerograms have to be read as the Akkadian words they stand for, the preterite, durative, perfect and stative kept apart, subordinate clauses followed to their final -u, and the measures, year names and eponyms of letters and contracts handled correctly. It is still an aid to reading and not a substitute for a critical edition, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary or a published scholarly translation, and any line you will cite should be checked against one.
Will the translation keep my document’s original layout?: The translator produces a translated PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel or EPUB file that aims to preserve the original layout, including tables, columns and headers. Text size, fonts and line breaks may change, so review the result against the original. Editions that print transliteration, normalization and translation in parallel are where the layout is most likely to shift.
Babylonian or Assyrian? Which dialect and period does it handle?: All of the main ones, from the same transliteration conventions: Old Akkadian, Old, Middle and Neo-Babylonian, Old, Middle and Neo-Assyrian, and the Standard Babylonian literary dialect used from the late second millennium on. The dialect shows on the page, since Assyrian vowel harmony, Old Assyrian orthography and the loss of mimation in later Babylonian are all visible in the spelling, and the translation follows the text it is given. Peripheral Akkadian, from Amarna, Nuzi, Ugarit or Hattusa, follows its own local habits and is where results are least even and an expert’s reading matters most.
Can it translate English into Akkadian?: Yes, as composition. A short exercise sentence, a motto or a dedication in the style of a royal inscription comes out in normalized Akkadian; say which dialect you want, since grammars teach Old Babylonian and inscriptions imitate Standard Babylonian. Akkadian is reconstructed from a closed corpus, so anything you will publish, teach from or have inscribed should be checked by an Assyriologist. Treat the output as a draft that follows attested vocabulary and word order, not as an ancient text.
What file types and transliteration conventions can I upload?: PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX (PowerPoint), XLSX (Excel) and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned pages as JPG, PNG or HEIC. Transliteration with diacritics and index numbers, normalization with macrons and circumflexes, the ASCII style of CDLI’s ATF files (sz, s,, t,) and typed Unicode cuneiform are all readable. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters.

See “Keep formatting” in action

Real examples of the “Keep formatting” option: original on the left, translated document on the right. Click either page to enlarge.

1 / 6

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