Is this Breton 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 or photographed Breton document?

Yes. Upload a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo, or a PDF that is really a scan, and the text is read before translating. Printed Breton, old or new, is ordinary Latin type and reads well. The characters to check are the apostrophe in c'h, which recognition can drop or misread so that c'h becomes ch, and the ñ in añ and eñ. Handwriting varies a lot with the hand, and handwritten Breton is usually mixed with French, so read those results as an aid to deciphering.

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

Breton is a small language with far less written text behind it than French, so expect to review more closely than you would for a French document. Fast gives the gist of an article or a worksheet. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for literature, older spellings and anything you will publish: it does better at recovering base words from their mutated forms, at the several verbs that all translate as 'is' (eo, zo, emañ, ez eus), at older and dialectal spellings, and at Breton word order, where the element placed first carries the emphasis. For anything that will be printed, have a Breton speaker read it.

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.

Can I use this for an official document?

Breton has no official status in France, so no registry office, court or consulate asks for a Breton translation, and the documents they issue are in French. For a birth certificate, a notarial act or a contract, use the French document page and then, if an authority requires it, a sworn translator; machine output is not a certified translation. Where Breton matters officially is in bilingual signage, some municipal communication and education, and for those a translation from here is a draft for a Breton speaker to finish.

Which spelling and which dialect do I get?

Output follows peurunvan, the spelling taught in Diwan and bilingual schools and used by most publishers, with the vocabulary of the standard written language. Readers from the Vannes country will notice that their spoken forms differ, and speakers who learned Breton at home may prefer a French borrowing where the standard uses a coined word (pellgomz or telefon for telephone, urzhiataer for computer). Going into English, upload any spelling: peurunvan, skolveurieg, interdialectal, pre-1941 or Vannetais texts all translate, with older material benefiting from the Advanced tier.

What file types can I upload?

PDF, Word (DOCX), PowerPoint (PPTX), Excel (XLSX) and EPUB, plus JPG, PNG and HEIC photos of pages. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters.

Breton PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Breton

Translate English to Breton or Breton 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 Breton documents come out

Upload a PDF, Word file, presentation or a photo of a page and translate it between English and Breton (brezhoneg), the Celtic language of western Brittany. What arrives here is Breton-medium school material from Diwan and the bilingual streams, songs and gwerz ballads, novels and poetry, magazines, hymnals, place-name lists and the occasional old letter. Official records from Brittany are in French, and belong on the French page. Both directions work, and French can be chosen as the target instead of English.

Breton is written in the Latin alphabet with a few marks that matter. The letter c'h, with its apostrophe, is separate from ch and stands for the sound in Scottish loch, so c'hoazh (still) and choaz (choice) are different words; the apostrophe is typed as a straight or curly quotation mark or dropped altogether, and text recognition then reads it as ch. Peurunvan, the 'fully unified' spelling adopted in 1941 and used today by Diwan schools, the Ofis Publik ar Brezhoneg and most publishers, also uses ñ to mark a nasal vowel (añ, eñ) and the compromise digraph zh, chosen so that Breizh can be read with a z by speakers from Léon, Trégor and Cornouaille and with an h in the Vannes country. It is not the only spelling in use. The university orthography (skolveurieg, 1955) spells many words differently, writing marh and lorh where peurunvan has marc'h and lorc'h, as in the title of Pêr-Jakez Helias's Marh al lorh; the interdialectal orthography (1975) has conventions of its own; pre-1941 texts, including many collected gwerzioù and religious books, follow older systems (Breiz); and Vannetais material is spelled differently again (Breih). Older printed Breton, from catechisms to the Barzaz Breiz, is set in ordinary Latin type and scans well; handwritten Breton is rare and usually mixed with French.

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 Breton

School materials from Diwan and the bilingual streams

Diwan immersion schools, founded in 1977, and the bilingual streams in public schools (Div Yezh) and Catholic schools (Dihun) produce exercise sheets, textbooks, reading books, notes to parents and end-of-year reports in Breton, and a large share of the parents do not read the language themselves. They upload homework and school notices to follow what their children are doing; teachers translate English worksheets and stories into Breton for class use; Celtic studies departments abroad upload course readers. English to Breton output for a classroom notice or a simple worksheet is a fair starting point, but a Breton-speaking teacher should read it before it goes on the wall.

Songs, ballads and literature

The gwerzioù (narrative ballads) and sonioù (lighter songs) of Lower Brittany fill collections from La Villemarqué's Barzaz Breiz (1839, whose texts were reworked by its editor) to Luzel's Gwerziou Breiz-Izel and the transcriptions of the Dastum sound archive, and singers and listeners abroad upload lyric sheets and fest-noz programmes to learn what a song says. Literature follows: the Gwalarn generation around Roparz Hemon, the poems of Anjela Duval, the journal Al Liamm, and today's novels and children's books. Much of this is in older or dialectal spelling, so use the Advanced tier and expect archaic words and Vannetais forms to need a second look.

Genealogy, place names and family papers

Family historians should know where Breton is and is not. Parish registers, état civil records, notarial acts and military papers from Brittany are in French (the earliest church registers in Latin), so those belong on the French document page. Breton appears in gravestone inscriptions, dedications, sayings copied into family bibles, letters between relatives who chose to write it, and in the names themselves: Le Goff is ar gov, the smith; place names in Ker-, Plou- and Lan- carry a hamlet, a parish and a monastic foundation; Quimper is Kemper, Vannes is Gwened, Lorient is An Oriant. Upload the Breton fragments here and the French pages there.

French documents

Media, church and community material

Breton has a small living press and public sphere: the weekly Ya!, the magazine Bremañ, online and broadcast programmes, the Breton Wikipedia, bilingual municipal notices, festival programmes and association newsletters, along with kantikoù (hymns) and mass texts for parishes that still sing in Breton. Readers upload a saved article or a scanned hymnal page to read it in English; organisations translate English material into Breton for festivals and cultural exchanges with Wales, Cornwall, Ireland and the Breton diaspora. Because so much of this is written by and for learners as well as native speakers, check that coined standard vocabulary and older borrowed words suit the audience you have in mind.

What to watch for in Breton document translation

Mutations are the first trap. The initial consonant of a Breton word changes according to the word before it: tad (father) becomes ma zad (my father), da dad (your father) and he zad (her father); ki (dog) becomes ma c'hi and da gi; merc'h (girl) becomes ar verc'h after the article. Looking each form up as written finds nothing, and the rules run the other way when English goes in, so an unmutated word after ma or da is a visible error to any speaker. Plurals are irregular (ki, chas; maen, mein), nouns stay singular after a numeral (tri c'hi, three dogs), and numbers count in twenties: tri-ugent is sixty, pevar-ugent eighty, dek ha tri-ugent seventy. Breton puts the emphasised element first and chooses the verbal particle (a or e) and a mutation from it, and 'is' is eo, zo, emañ or ez eus, so word-for-word rendering from English produces French-shaped Breton that speakers recognise at once. Spelling varies by orthography and dialect, so Breizh, Breiz and Breih are one word across editions, and c'h is easily lost in scans. Vocabulary is layered: the standard uses coined words where older speakers use French borrowings, so a Diwan worksheet and a letter to an elderly relative should not read the same. Personal and place names have French and Breton forms (Yann and Jean, Soazig and Françoise, Kemper and Quimper), and a document should keep one form throughout.

Breton document translation FAQ

Is this Breton 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 or photographed Breton document?: Yes. Upload a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo, or a PDF that is really a scan, and the text is read before translating. Printed Breton, old or new, is ordinary Latin type and reads well. The characters to check are the apostrophe in c'h, which recognition can drop or misread so that c'h becomes ch, and the ñ in añ and eñ. Handwriting varies a lot with the hand, and handwritten Breton is usually mixed with French, so read those results as an aid to deciphering.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Breton is a small language with far less written text behind it than French, so expect to review more closely than you would for a French document. Fast gives the gist of an article or a worksheet. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for literature, older spellings and anything you will publish: it does better at recovering base words from their mutated forms, at the several verbs that all translate as 'is' (eo, zo, emañ, ez eus), at older and dialectal spellings, and at Breton word order, where the element placed first carries the emphasis. For anything that will be printed, have a Breton speaker read it.
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.
Can I use this for an official document?: Breton has no official status in France, so no registry office, court or consulate asks for a Breton translation, and the documents they issue are in French. For a birth certificate, a notarial act or a contract, use the French document page and then, if an authority requires it, a sworn translator; machine output is not a certified translation. Where Breton matters officially is in bilingual signage, some municipal communication and education, and for those a translation from here is a draft for a Breton speaker to finish.
Which spelling and which dialect do I get?: Output follows peurunvan, the spelling taught in Diwan and bilingual schools and used by most publishers, with the vocabulary of the standard written language. Readers from the Vannes country will notice that their spoken forms differ, and speakers who learned Breton at home may prefer a French borrowing where the standard uses a coined word (pellgomz or telefon for telephone, urzhiataer for computer). Going into English, upload any spelling: peurunvan, skolveurieg, interdialectal, pre-1941 or Vannetais texts all translate, with older material benefiting from the Advanced tier.
What file types can I upload?: PDF, Word (DOCX), PowerPoint (PPTX), Excel (XLSX) and EPUB, plus JPG, PNG and HEIC photos of pages. 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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