Is the Ancient Greek 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 scanned PDFs and photos of old Greek editions?

Yes. Upload a scanned PDF or a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo and the text is recognized before translation. Clean scans of modern editions in a standard Greek typeface usually come through well, accents and breathings included. Harder cases are nineteenth-century printings with tight or faded type, early printed Greek from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with its ligatures and abbreviations, and manuscripts, where results vary a lot. Photographs of inscriptions and papyri are the least reliable input of all; type the transcription or upload the edition instead. A dropped accent or breathing often makes no difference to the sense, but sometimes it does, so check any form your argument hangs on.

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

Fast gives a quick, readable version and is fine for orienting yourself in a long text. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for anything you will cite, teach from or hand in: it is the tier that copes with a long Greek period, with aspect (aorist against imperfect), with particles, with the optative and its conditionals, and with keeping a dialogue's speakers straight. Neither tier replaces a critical edition or a published scholarly translation. The output is a reading aid, and where the Greek is ambiguous it will pick one reading rather than footnote the alternatives.

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. English runs longer than Greek, so expect smaller type or tighter lines within the same frame; marginal line numbers, footnotes and the apparatus are part of that layout.

Which Greek does it handle: Attic, Homeric, Ionic, Doric, Koine?

The Ancient Greek engine reads the classical dialects as they appear in the source: Homeric and Hesiodic epic, Herodotus's Ionic, Attic prose and drama, the Doric of choral lyric and Theocritus, Sappho's Aeolic, and the Koine of the New Testament, the Septuagint, Polybius and the papyri; later Byzantine Greek passes through the same engine. When you translate English into Greek, the default is Classical Attic. For New Testament and Septuagint work start from the Koine Greek page, and for anything modern, including katharevousa, use the Greek page: Modern Greek, monotonic or polytonic, is a different language for translation purposes.

Can I translate an English document into Ancient Greek?

Yes, and the output is Classical Attic with full polytonic accentuation. Be realistic about what that is: composition, not translation into a living language. It is useful for a motto, a dedication, a short passage for a class exercise, or a comparison against your own prose composition. For a whole document the Greek may be grammatical without being idiomatic in the way a text by a native speaker was, and anything meant to be printed, inscribed or performed should be reviewed by someone who reads Greek professionally.

What file types can I upload?

PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX (PowerPoint), XLSX (Excel) and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned pages as JPG, PNG or HEIC. Unicode polytonic Greek in the text layer is the ideal input; scans and photos get text recognition first. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters.

Ancient Greek PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Ancient Greek

Translate English to Ancient Greek or Ancient Greek 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 Ancient Greek documents come out

Upload a PDF, Word file or scanned pages of Ancient Greek and read them in English: a book of Thucydides from an Oxford Classical Text, a Teubner or Budé edition, a chapter of the Greek New Testament or the Septuagint, a papyrus transcription, a commentary with untranslated Greek in it, or a course handout. Polytonic Greek is read as it stands on the page, accents and breathings included, and the translation comes back in the original layout. English into Ancient Greek works too, for short compositions and exercises.

Ancient Greek is printed in the polytonic system: acute, grave and circumflex accents, rough and smooth breathings, the iota subscript (ᾳ, ῃ, ῳ) and the diaeresis; Modern Greek officially dropped most of this in 1982, keeping a single accent and the diaeresis. Modern editions encode these in Unicode, but not consistently: some use precomposed letters from the Greek Extended block, others stack combining marks, and PDFs made from scans of nineteenth-century Teubners often carry a text layer in which the Greek is garbage even though the page looks fine. Those pages are read visually, like a scan. Editions bring their own furniture: line numbers every five lines in verse, Stephanus pages for Plato and Bekker numbers for Aristotle in the margin, abbreviated speaker names in drama, a critical apparatus at the foot of the page written in a shorthand of manuscript sigla and Latin, and editorial brackets and daggers inside the text itself. Loeb volumes print Greek and English on facing pages, so only half the pages need translating. Papyrological and epigraphic publications add the Leiden conventions (square brackets for lost text, dots under doubtful letters, parentheses for resolved abbreviations), and inscriptions themselves stand in capitals, usually with no accents, breathings or word breaks. The translation is fitted into the original layout, with type size and line breaks adjusted where the English runs longer, which it usually does.

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 Ancient Greek

Classical texts, editions and course readers

Students and teachers bring the texts a Greek course runs on: a book of the Iliad or the Anabasis, a Platonic dialogue, a speech of Lysias or Demosthenes, a tragedy, Herodotus in Ionic. Upload the PDF of an Oxford Classical Text, a Teubner, a Budé or a course reader and read it in English beside the Greek, to check a prepared translation or get through an unassigned passage before class. Advanced is the tier for this: it is built to hold a long period together, keep μέν and δέ in balance, and render an aorist as an aorist rather than a vague past. Treat the result as a reading aid next to the Greek, not a replacement for a published translation.

New Testament, Septuagint and patristic Greek

Seminarians, pastors and theology students upload a chapter from a Nestle-Aland or UBS Greek New Testament, a Rahlfs Septuagint, the Apostolic Fathers, or a column of Migne's Patrologia Graeca, a great deal of which has never been translated into English. The apparatus at the foot of the page is shorthand, not prose: read the variants there yourself rather than trusting any rendering of them. For New Testament and Septuagint work, start from the Koine Greek translator, which sets Koine rather than Attic as the default; the difference shows in vocabulary and in the Semitic idiom the Septuagint carries over from Hebrew.

Koine Greek translator

Papyri, inscriptions and documentary texts

Documentary Greek is its own world: contracts, petitions, tax receipts and private letters from Egypt in the papyrological corpora, decrees and dedications in Inscriptiones Graecae and the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, funerary epigrams on stone. Editions print these with the Leiden conventions, and the language is Koine in the papyri and often a local dialect in older inscriptions, with spellings, abbreviations and formulae that literary dictionaries do not cover. A typed or edited transcription translates far better than a photograph of the stone or the papyrus. Reading letters from an image of a worn inscription is not something to rely on, so upload the edition or your own transcription and keep the photo for checking.

Commentaries, articles and dissertations

Much of the scholarship a classicist or theologian needs sets untranslated Greek in the middle of English, German, French or Italian prose: philological commentaries, lexicon entries, journal articles, older dissertations. Upload the whole article rather than retyping the Greek, and use Advanced for the mixed material. This is where a text PDF beats a scan, because the Greek in the text layer is already exact; with a scan, check any quotation the argument depends on against the page image. Dissertations go the other way as well: a chapter drafted in English can be turned into Greek only as a composition exercise, and any Greek meant for publication needs a Hellenist's eye.

What to watch for in Ancient Greek document translation

The traps in Ancient Greek documents are mostly about the page, not the language. The apparatus criticus is the first: a line such as 12 ἔφη B: ἔφην A is a note about manuscripts, and any tool that treats it as prose produces nonsense. Editorial signs are the second: square brackets, angle brackets, daggers and sublinear dots each mean something specific (lost text, an editor's supplement, a corrupt passage, a doubtful letter), and a translation that silently absorbs supplied text or skips a crux hides what a scholar needs to see. Bad OCR of polytonic type is the third: drop the accent and the iota subscript and ἀγορᾷ (dative) becomes ἀγορά (nominative), ἤ (or) becomes ἥ (who) or ἦ (truly). Then the language: a system that mostly knows Modern Greek reads ancient words in modern senses (πονηρός is wicked, not sly; ἄγγελος is a messenger before it is an angel), flattens aorist and imperfect into one past tense, loses the balance of μέν and δέ, and stumbles on crasis and elision (τἀγαθόν, δ' for δέ). Proper names come out in two conventions, Latinized (Ajax, Thucydides) and transliterated (Aias, Thoukydides); pick one and keep it. And Septuagint chapter and verse numbering differs from the Hebrew and English Bibles in the Psalms and elsewhere, so a reference that looks wrong may simply be Greek.

Ancient Greek document translation FAQ

Is the Ancient Greek 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 scanned PDFs and photos of old Greek editions?: Yes. Upload a scanned PDF or a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo and the text is recognized before translation. Clean scans of modern editions in a standard Greek typeface usually come through well, accents and breathings included. Harder cases are nineteenth-century printings with tight or faded type, early printed Greek from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with its ligatures and abbreviations, and manuscripts, where results vary a lot. Photographs of inscriptions and papyri are the least reliable input of all; type the transcription or upload the edition instead. A dropped accent or breathing often makes no difference to the sense, but sometimes it does, so check any form your argument hangs on.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Fast gives a quick, readable version and is fine for orienting yourself in a long text. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for anything you will cite, teach from or hand in: it is the tier that copes with a long Greek period, with aspect (aorist against imperfect), with particles, with the optative and its conditionals, and with keeping a dialogue's speakers straight. Neither tier replaces a critical edition or a published scholarly translation. The output is a reading aid, and where the Greek is ambiguous it will pick one reading rather than footnote the alternatives.
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. English runs longer than Greek, so expect smaller type or tighter lines within the same frame; marginal line numbers, footnotes and the apparatus are part of that layout.
Which Greek does it handle: Attic, Homeric, Ionic, Doric, Koine?: The Ancient Greek engine reads the classical dialects as they appear in the source: Homeric and Hesiodic epic, Herodotus's Ionic, Attic prose and drama, the Doric of choral lyric and Theocritus, Sappho's Aeolic, and the Koine of the New Testament, the Septuagint, Polybius and the papyri; later Byzantine Greek passes through the same engine. When you translate English into Greek, the default is Classical Attic. For New Testament and Septuagint work start from the Koine Greek page, and for anything modern, including katharevousa, use the Greek page: Modern Greek, monotonic or polytonic, is a different language for translation purposes.
Can I translate an English document into Ancient Greek?: Yes, and the output is Classical Attic with full polytonic accentuation. Be realistic about what that is: composition, not translation into a living language. It is useful for a motto, a dedication, a short passage for a class exercise, or a comparison against your own prose composition. For a whole document the Greek may be grammatical without being idiomatic in the way a text by a native speaker was, and anything meant to be printed, inscribed or performed should be reviewed by someone who reads Greek professionally.
What file types can I upload?: PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX (PowerPoint), XLSX (Excel) and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned pages as JPG, PNG or HEIC. Unicode polytonic Greek in the text layer is the ideal input; scans and photos get text recognition first. 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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