Aramaic PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Aramaic
Translate English to Aramaic or Aramaic 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.
How Aramaic documents come out
Upload a PDF, Word file or photographed page of Aramaic and read it in English: the Aramaic chapters of Daniel and Ezra, a Targum column from a rabbinic Bible, a page of the Babylonian Talmud, a Dead Sea Scrolls transcription, an Elephantine papyrus, a ketubah, or the Kaddish and Kol Nidre from a prayer book. The engine reads the square Hebrew script, pointed or unpointed, and returns the translation in your document's layout. English into Aramaic is possible for short texts, within the limits explained below.
Aramaic is not one language but a family of dialects spread over three thousand years, and the documents look as different as the dialects sound. Nearly everything Jewish is printed in the square Hebrew script: Biblical Aramaic with full Tiberian pointing in BHS-style editions, Targum Onkelos and Targum Jonathan beside the Hebrew in Mikraot Gedolot, the Talmud unpointed in the Vilna page layout with Rashi and Tosafot around the text in the semi-cursive Rashi typeface, the Zohar, and the traditional ketubah in calligraphy. Rabbinic printing abbreviates constantly, with gershayim marking the clipped words (א״ר for אמר רבי, ת״ר for תנו רבנן, א״ל for אמר ליה), and Hebrew and Aramaic alternate on the same page, sometimes within a sentence. Older and non-Jewish Aramaic is written in other scripts: early inscriptions and Achaemenid papyri in older Aramaic scripts, Nabataean and Palmyrene in theirs, Syriac in Estrangela, Serto or Madnhaya, Mandaic and Samaritan in scripts of their own. Scholarly editions of scrolls, papyri and inscriptions transcribe into square script or transliteration, with brackets for lost text and dots or circlets over doubtful letters. Right-to-left text, columns and marginal glosses are all part of the layout the translation is fitted into.
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 Aramaic
Biblical Aramaic and the Targums
The Aramaic of Daniel 2–7 and Ezra 4–7 is short enough to read closely and different enough from Hebrew to trip up a Hebrew reader: the emphatic state ending in א where Hebrew uses the article, דִּי as the all-purpose relative and genitive marker, a verb system with its own stems (peal, pael, haphel). Seminary and university students upload the pointed text from BHS or a reader, or the Targum column from Mikraot Gedolot, to check a prepared translation or to see how Onkelos, Jonathan, Neofiti or Pseudo-Jonathan paraphrase the Hebrew. Mixed Hebrew and Aramaic pages can go up as one file; use Advanced so the shift between the two languages is followed rather than flattened.
Talmud, Zohar and rabbinic study sheets
The Gemara of the Babylonian Talmud is Jewish Babylonian Aramaic wrapped around Hebrew Mishnah and baraitot, printed without vowels and dense with abbreviations. Daf yomi learners, yeshiva students and academic readers upload a daf, a source-sheet printout, a page of Zohar or a responsum to get through the Aramaic and follow the argument. Use Advanced: the move from Mishnah to Gemara is a change of language, the abbreviations only make sense in context, and a term like תיקו or קל וחומר is a technical step in an argument, not a phrase to render word by word. Steinsaltz and ArtScroll editions already translate; this page is for the pages that do not.
Scrolls, papyri and inscriptions
Qumran Aramaic texts (the Genesis Apocryphon, the Aramaic Enoch fragments, the Aramaic Levi Document, Tobit, the New Jerusalem text), the fifth-century BCE Elephantine papyri, Nabataean and Palmyrene inscriptions, and the Aramaic incantation bowls of late antique Mesopotamia all reach readers through editions: DJD volumes, Porten and Yardeni's Textbook of Aramaic Documents, the epigraphic corpora. Upload the edition or a typed transcription. A photograph of the papyrus, bowl or stone is not a reliable input for reading letters in a damaged ancient hand; the transcription is where the epigraphers have already done that work, and its brackets and dots tell you what was supplied and what is doubtful.
Ketubot, liturgy and family papers
The Aramaic most people actually own is liturgical and ceremonial: the ketubah from a wedding, written in the traditional formula with the couple's names, the Hebrew date and the place; a get; the Kaddish, Kol Nidre, Yekum Purkan, Akdamut and Had Gadya in a siddur, machzor or Haggadah; the Aramaic passages in a family's Zohar. Families translate their grandparents' ketubah for the names, date and witnesses it records, and mourners who say Kaddish want to know what they are saying. Calligraphed and decorated ketubot are the handwriting case: clear formal lettering often reads well, ornate or faded lettering less so, and since the wording is formulaic, concentrate your checking on the names, the date and the place.
What to watch for in Aramaic document translation
The first trap is that Aramaic shares its letters with Hebrew, so a document is often both at once, and a translator that assumes one language throughout misreads the other: the Mishnah at the head of a sugya is Hebrew, the discussion that follows is Aramaic, and a Targum column paraphrases a Hebrew verse it does not reproduce. Unpointed text is the second: without vowels many forms are ambiguous and the reader supplies them from context, which is where a weak system guesses. Abbreviations are the third, since a page of Gemara is thick with them, and א״ל, ה״נ, ל״ק and hundreds of others expand differently by context. Then dialect: the emphatic state (מַלְכָּא, the king) is a determiner, not a suffix to ignore; דִּי and ד are relative, genitive or conjunction by turns; Babylonian Aramaic often drops final consonants and uses forms a Biblical Aramaic grammar never lists. Talmudic terms of art (קושיא, תירוץ, תיקו) are moves in an argument, not phrases to be rendered word by word. Ketubot and gittin carry Hebrew calendar dates and personal names with bar and bat that should be converted and spelled consistently. And for anything translated into Aramaic, remember that the target is a reconstructed literary dialect, not the Galilean speech of the first century, which is barely attested.
Aramaic document translation FAQ
- Is the Aramaic 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 scanned Talmud page, a photographed ketubah or a manuscript?
- Yes for scans and photos in general: upload a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo or a scanned PDF and the text is recognized before translation. Clean printed square script, pointed or unpointed, usually comes through well, and Rashi script in a good scan may come through as well, though check it. Harder cases are ketubah calligraphy, especially decorated or faded pieces, manuscript hands, and the small dense type of older Vilna-style printings where letters such as ד and ר or ב and כ blur together. Photographs of papyri, bowls and inscriptions are the least reliable input; use the published transcription. Check names and dates against the page in every handwritten case.
- How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?
- Fast gives a quick readable version, good for orienting yourself in a long sugya or scanning a Targum for a phrase. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for study, teaching or anything you will cite: it is the tier that follows the switch between Hebrew and Aramaic, expands rabbinic abbreviations in context, and keeps dialect in view, so that Biblical Aramaic, Targumic Aramaic and the Babylonian Aramaic of the Gemara are not all read as the same language. Neither tier replaces a critical edition, a lexicon such as Jastrow or Sokoloff, or a published scholarly translation; the output is a reading aid, and where a line is ambiguous it will choose 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. Right-to-left text and the Vilna page's centre-and-margins arrangement are part of the layout; English usually runs longer than unpointed Aramaic, so expect adjusted type size or line breaks.
- Which Aramaic does it cover: Biblical, Targumic, Talmudic, Syriac, modern?
- This page covers the Aramaic written in the square Hebrew script: Biblical Aramaic (Daniel, Ezra), the Imperial Aramaic of the Persian period, Qumran Aramaic, the Targums, the Jewish Palestinian and Babylonian Aramaic of the two Talmuds and the midrashim, and the literary Aramaic of the Zohar. Syriac, the Christian Aramaic of Edessa with its own scripts and a large literature (the Peshitta, Ephrem, the liturgies), has its own translator and its own document page. The modern spoken Neo-Aramaic languages of Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac Christians and of the Jews of Kurdistan differ considerably from all of these and are not what this page is built for.
- Can I translate English into Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke?
- You can translate a short English text into Aramaic, and it is worth knowing what you get. The everyday Galilean Aramaic of first-century Palestine survives only in scraps (a few words and phrases in the Gospels, inscriptions and ossuaries; the fuller Galilean Aramaic texts are centuries later), so any modern rendering is a reconstruction in a standard literary dialect, written in square script. Much of what circulates online as 'the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic' is actually the Syriac of the Peshitta, a related but later, Christian literary dialect. For study that is fine. For a tattoo, an inscription or a liturgical text, have someone trained in Aramaic review the result, and expect a plausible literary dialect rather than the exact words as Jesus would have spoken them.
- 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 Hebrew-script text 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.
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