Is it free to translate a Hebrew document to English?

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 or photographed Hebrew documents, including handwriting?

Yes. Upload a scanned PDF or a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo and text recognition runs before translation. Printed certificates, letters and stamped forms come through well when the page is flat and sharp; small print, faded stamps and signatures need checking against the source. Handwritten cursive Hebrew is the hard case, because its letterforms differ from print and writers run letters together, so treat those results as an aid to deciphering rather than a finished transcription. Rashi-script pages are also harder than square type.

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

Fast is for reading quickly. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the choice for anything you will act on: it resolves unpointed homographs from context, expands gershayim abbreviations, keeps grammatical gender consistent when writing Hebrew to a specific reader, holds one Latin spelling per name across a file, and handles the legal and bureaucratic register of Israeli paperwork. For certificates, contracts and academic work, use Advanced and check names, ID numbers and dates yourself.

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 is handled in the output, but the page is not mirrored, so check tables, mixed Hebrew-English lines, phone numbers and parentheses against the original.

Can I use this for official submissions in Israel or abroad?

Not on its own. Israeli authorities and courts generally want a notarial translation (a notary who knows both languages certifies it, or certifies a translator's declaration), and documents going abroad usually need an apostille as well; USCIS and similar agencies require a signed certification of accuracy. Use the translation to understand a document, prepare a draft and work out which pages need certifying, then have those done formally.

Which Hebrew do I get, and what if my document is not modern Hebrew?

The target is modern Israeli Hebrew, unpointed, in the formal register documents use. Hebrew verbs and adjectives change with the gender of the person addressed, so if a letter must speak to a woman or a man, check those forms in the output. Biblical Hebrew (pointed, with its own grammar) has its own page, and the Tanakh belongs there. Yiddish uses the same letters but is a different language with its own page. Rabbinic Hebrew with Aramaic works here on Advanced.

What file types can I upload?

PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX (PowerPoint), XLSX (Excel) and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned documents as JPG, PNG or HEIC. Word files keep their paragraphs and tables editable, and Hebrew EPUB books translate as whole files. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters.

Hebrew PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Hebrew

Translate English to Hebrew or Hebrew 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 Hebrew documents come out

Translate a Hebrew PDF, Word file or scanned certificate into English, or an English document into Hebrew, with the layout kept and right-to-left text handled. People upload a teudat zehut with its sefach, birth and marriage certificates, an IDF discharge certificate, Bituach Leumi and tax letters, rental contracts, transcripts and journal articles, and family papers going back generations. Hebrew output is unpointed modern Israeli Hebrew in the formal register documents use; Biblical Hebrew, with its own grammar and pointing, has a separate page.

Hebrew is written right to left in a 22-letter consonantal alphabet, five of whose letters take a different form at the end of a word (ך ם ן ף ץ). Nearly everything adults read is unpointed: the nikud vowel marks appear in children's books, poetry, prayer books and dictionaries, not in a bank letter or a contract, and modern unpointed spelling (ktiv male) adds extra vav and yod to compensate. Handwriting is a second alphabet in practice, since cursive Hebrew letterforms look little like the printed ones on a form. Documents mix directions constantly: Western digits, English acronyms, product names, email addresses and the shekel sign sit inside right-to-left lines, and older PDFs and files saved in the legacy visual-order encoding (ISO-8859-8) can hold their text reversed, so copying from them yields backwards words; we read such pages visually. Two dating systems coexist: Israeli documents write day.month.year, and official records also carry the Hebrew date written in letters with gershayim (י"ד בכסלו תשפ"ה), where 15 and 16 are ט"ו and ט"ז. Abbreviations marked with gershayim are everywhere (ת"ז, בע"מ, מע"מ, ז"ל). And Hebrew letters do not always mean Hebrew: Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic and the Aramaic of a ketubah or the Talmud use the same alphabet, and older commentaries are printed in the semi-cursive Rashi script.

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 Hebrew

Israeli civil and immigration documents

The paperwork that crosses the language line most often is Israeli: the teudat zehut and its sefach (the attachment listing address, spouse and children), birth and death certificates from the Population and Immigration Authority, a Rabbinate marriage certificate (the ketubah itself is mostly Aramaic), the IDF teudat shichrur and service confirmations, Bituach Leumi letters, Tofes 106 salary statements, pay slips, bank confirmations and a nesach tabu land-registry extract. They go into visa files, university admissions, foreign pension claims and citizenship applications (German and Austrian restoration cases often need a full set). Upload the scan, use Advanced, and check that every name matches the Latin spelling in the passport.

Contracts, court and business papers

Rental and purchase agreements (chozeh sechirut, chozeh mecher), employment contracts, powers of attorney, wills, tax invoices (cheshbonit mas), company documents from the Registrar of Companies, court rulings and rabbinical-court decisions arrive in dense legal Hebrew full of gershayim abbreviations (ח"פ, ע"ר, ע"י) and a formal register that machine output often flattens. Read them in English before a call with the other side, or translate an English agreement into Hebrew as a draft for an Israeli lawyer to finalize. Advanced keeps defined terms consistent across a long contract and expands the abbreviations instead of copying them.

Academic, literary and rabbinic texts

Israeli universities publish theses and journal articles in Hebrew across archaeology, Jewish history, Bible studies, law and the social sciences, and much of it is never translated; researchers upload PDFs to read them, and Israeli students translate their own abstracts and coursework the other way. Modern Hebrew fiction and journalism work the same way, as do responsa, halakhic works and commentaries written in Rabbinic Hebrew mixed with Aramaic, which Advanced handles far better than Fast; scans in Rashi script are harder than square type. For the Tanakh and other Biblical Hebrew, use the dedicated page.

Biblical Hebrew documents

Genealogy: tombstones, letters and yizkor books

Jewish family research runs through Hebrew even where the family spoke something else: tombstone inscriptions with their formulas (פ"נ at the top, תנצב"ה at the bottom), the father's name and a Hebrew-calendar death date; ketubot; community registers (pinkasim); letters from Mandate Palestine and early Israel in cursive; and the yizkor memorial books written after the Holocaust in Hebrew and Yiddish. Photograph stones straight on in good light; crisply carved square letters read well, worn or painted ones vary. Handwritten letters are a starting point for deciphering. If a page turns out to be Yiddish, that is a separate language with its own page.

Yiddish documents

What to watch for in Hebrew document translation

Unpointed Hebrew is the source of most errors: ספר is a book, a barber or a past-tense count depending on vowels no one wrote, so a system has to read the sentence, not the word, and a wrong pick can change a clause of a contract. Going into Hebrew, gender and number are unavoidable: verbs and adjectives agree with the person addressed, forms and notices that must work for anyone use את/ה or the masculine plural, and English 'you' gives no clue. Abbreviations with gershayim (ת"ז, ח"פ, מע"מ, ע"ר, ז"ל) need expanding, not transliterating. Dates fail in two ways: Israeli day.month.year gets flipped into American order, and Hebrew-calendar dates written in letters get copied as if they were words. Names are the genealogist's problem: Hebrew spells foreign names phonetically and Latin script spells Hebrew names several ways (Cohen, Kohen; Yitzhak, Itzhak, Isaac), while the passport allows exactly one. Then the mechanical traps: text reversed by legacy encodings, nine-digit ID numbers and phone numbers flipped inside right-to-left lines, parentheses and question marks rendered on the wrong side, ₪ and NIS, and Aramaic passages in a ketubah or a court document that are not Hebrew at all. Advanced treats these as judgment calls; a fluent reader should still check the critical lines.

Hebrew document translation FAQ

Is it free to translate a Hebrew document to English?: 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 or photographed Hebrew documents, including handwriting?: Yes. Upload a scanned PDF or a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo and text recognition runs before translation. Printed certificates, letters and stamped forms come through well when the page is flat and sharp; small print, faded stamps and signatures need checking against the source. Handwritten cursive Hebrew is the hard case, because its letterforms differ from print and writers run letters together, so treat those results as an aid to deciphering rather than a finished transcription. Rashi-script pages are also harder than square type.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Fast is for reading quickly. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the choice for anything you will act on: it resolves unpointed homographs from context, expands gershayim abbreviations, keeps grammatical gender consistent when writing Hebrew to a specific reader, holds one Latin spelling per name across a file, and handles the legal and bureaucratic register of Israeli paperwork. For certificates, contracts and academic work, use Advanced and check names, ID numbers and dates yourself.
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 is handled in the output, but the page is not mirrored, so check tables, mixed Hebrew-English lines, phone numbers and parentheses against the original.
Can I use this for official submissions in Israel or abroad?: Not on its own. Israeli authorities and courts generally want a notarial translation (a notary who knows both languages certifies it, or certifies a translator's declaration), and documents going abroad usually need an apostille as well; USCIS and similar agencies require a signed certification of accuracy. Use the translation to understand a document, prepare a draft and work out which pages need certifying, then have those done formally.
Which Hebrew do I get, and what if my document is not modern Hebrew?: The target is modern Israeli Hebrew, unpointed, in the formal register documents use. Hebrew verbs and adjectives change with the gender of the person addressed, so if a letter must speak to a woman or a man, check those forms in the output. Biblical Hebrew (pointed, with its own grammar) has its own page, and the Tanakh belongs there. Yiddish uses the same letters but is a different language with its own page. Rabbinic Hebrew with Aramaic works here on Advanced.
What file types can I upload?: PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX (PowerPoint), XLSX (Excel) and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned documents as JPG, PNG or HEIC. Word files keep their paragraphs and tables editable, and Hebrew EPUB books translate as whole files. 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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