Is the English–Italian 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 translate a scanned or photographed Italian document?

Yes. Upload a JPG, PNG, or HEIC — a phone photo of a paper certificate works — and we read the text before translating it. Italian print scans well, including accented vowels and the E' apostrophe convention older typewritten records use for È. Clear handwriting in modern records usually reads fine; heavily faded 19th-century register entries or ornate parish script may come back partial, so check names and dates against the original.

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

Fast is a quick, capable tier suited to everyday documents where you mainly need to know what the text says. Advanced runs on a frontier model and is the right choice when register and precision matter: contracts, notarial deeds, anything in burocratese, and older or literary Italian. Advanced is noticeably better at Italian legal formulae, false friends, and keeping formal Lei-register consistent when translating into Italian. For anything you will act on, use Advanced and review the key clauses.

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. Italian runs 15–25% longer than English, so the formatted output adjusts type size and line breaks to fit.

Can I use this for my Italian citizenship application or other official filings?

Not as the final submission. Italian consulates, comuni, and courts require certified translations — typically a traduzione giurata sworn before an Italian court, or a translation certified to the consulate's own rules. Use this tool for everything before that step: reading the records you receive, confirming you ordered the right estratto, and checking a certified translation against the original. It saves paying certification rates just to find out what a document says.

What file formats can I upload, and how large can they be?

PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, and EPUB, plus JPG, PNG, and HEIC for scanned or photographed documents. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters. If a scan is over the limit, splitting it into per-page images or a smaller PDF usually gets you under it.

Does it handle formal Italian, bureaucratic language, and regional dialects?

Standard Italian in both directions, including formal register — business correspondence comes out with Lei rather than tu — and the bureaucratic style of official documents. Neapolitan and Sicilian are distinct languages, not accents of Italian, and Polytranslator supports both as separate language pairs; if an old family record mixes dialect or Latin with Italian, the Advanced tier handles the mixture best. Modern written Italian is otherwise uniform nationwide, so there is no dialect choice to make for contemporary documents.

Italian PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Italian

Translate English to Italian or Italian 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 Italian documents come out

Upload a PDF, Word file, or a photo of a paper document and translate it between English and Italian in minutes. The tool handles the documents people actually need in this pair — a scanned birth certificate from a comune archive, a supplier contract, a notarial deed, a 400-page manual — not just clean digital text. You can try it free, without an account.

Italian uses the Latin alphabet and reads left to right, so unlike Arabic or Hebrew there is no layout mirroring to worry about — the real document issues are subtler. Accents carry meaning: the grave/acute distinction separates words (e "and" vs. è "is", ne vs. né), and because Italian keyboards make the capital È awkward to type, official documents are full of the E' apostrophe workaround, which confuses naive OCR. Scans also have to deal with heavy elision (l'atto, un'altra, dell'ufficio), which splits words across apostrophes, and older PDFs often encode accented vowels as broken combining characters. Numbers are formatted the European way — comma for decimals, dot for thousands (€ 1.500,00) — and dates run day/month/year, both of which matter in spreadsheets and contracts. Printed Italian also favors caporali (« ») over English quotation marks. Italian text runs roughly 15–25% longer than the same content in English, so the formatted output adjusts type size and line breaks to fit.

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 Italian

Citizenship by descent and family records

The single biggest reason people translate Italian documents to English is jure sanguinis — Italian citizenship through an ancestor. That means estratti and certificati from comune archives: birth, marriage, and death acts, often scanned, sometimes handwritten, and (for pre-unification and parish records) sometimes partly in Latin. Upload the scan to read what you actually have, check names and dates against your family tree, and confirm a record is the right one before paying a certified translator to prepare the official version.

Contracts, company paperwork, and technical files

Italy is a top-ten exporter, and the paperwork that comes with Italian suppliers is distinctive: visura camerale company extracts, fatture, CE declarations of conformity, and machinery manuals from the industrial north. These documents are written in formal register — the capitalized Lei, Spett.le headers, Distinti saluti closings — and often in burocratese, the dense official style with nested clauses and embedded Latin. The Advanced tier is built for exactly this. XLSX support means price lists and spec sheets translate with their tables intact, decimal commas and all.

Books, research, and archival sources

Italian is a working language for art history, musicology, classics, and Renaissance studies, and a great deal of scholarship and primary material never gets an English edition. EPUB support lets you translate a monograph or a long archival transcription as a structured book, with its chapters kept. Older texts in early modern Italian are where the frontier-model Advanced tier clearly outperforms the Fast tier.

Moving to, retiring in, or buying property in Italy

Anyone dealing with Italian bureaucracy from abroad accumulates documents fast: the rogito and preliminary contract when buying a house, a contratto di locazione when renting, codice fiscale and residency paperwork, utility contracts, and medical records in both directions. Upload each one as it arrives and get a readable English version, so you know what you are signing before the appointment at the notaio — or translate your own records into Italian for a doctor or ufficio anagrafe.

Translate Italian medical records

What to watch for in Italian document translation

The classic failures in this pair are register and false friends. Machine output that addresses an Italian business contact as tu instead of the capitalized Lei reads as unprofessional, and English drafts translated too literally miss the fixed formulae Italian correspondence expects (Spett.le, Egregio Dott., Distinti saluti). Going the other way, Italian is dense with false friends that flip meaning in legal and business documents: eventualmente means "possibly," not "eventually"; attualmente means "currently," not "actually"; morbido is "soft," libreria is a bookshop, and fattoria is a farm. Institutional terms — codice fiscale, visura camerale, rogito, comune — have no clean English equivalents and are better glossed than force-translated, which is how the Advanced tier treats them. Numbers are a quiet hazard: 1.500 is one thousand five hundred in an Italian spreadsheet, and a translator that "fixes" the punctuation silently changes amounts. Add burocratese — sentences that nest four subordinate clauses and drop in Latin like de cuius — and it becomes clear why Italian official documents are harder to translate well than everyday Italian prose.

Italian document translation FAQ

Is the English–Italian 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 translate a scanned or photographed Italian document?: Yes. Upload a JPG, PNG, or HEIC — a phone photo of a paper certificate works — and we read the text before translating it. Italian print scans well, including accented vowels and the E' apostrophe convention older typewritten records use for È. Clear handwriting in modern records usually reads fine; heavily faded 19th-century register entries or ornate parish script may come back partial, so check names and dates against the original.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Fast is a quick, capable tier suited to everyday documents where you mainly need to know what the text says. Advanced runs on a frontier model and is the right choice when register and precision matter: contracts, notarial deeds, anything in burocratese, and older or literary Italian. Advanced is noticeably better at Italian legal formulae, false friends, and keeping formal Lei-register consistent when translating into Italian. For anything you will act on, use Advanced and review the key clauses.
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. Italian runs 15–25% longer than English, so the formatted output adjusts type size and line breaks to fit.
Can I use this for my Italian citizenship application or other official filings?: Not as the final submission. Italian consulates, comuni, and courts require certified translations — typically a traduzione giurata sworn before an Italian court, or a translation certified to the consulate's own rules. Use this tool for everything before that step: reading the records you receive, confirming you ordered the right estratto, and checking a certified translation against the original. It saves paying certification rates just to find out what a document says.
What file formats can I upload, and how large can they be?: PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, and EPUB, plus JPG, PNG, and HEIC for scanned or photographed documents. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters. If a scan is over the limit, splitting it into per-page images or a smaller PDF usually gets you under it.
Does it handle formal Italian, bureaucratic language, and regional dialects?: Standard Italian in both directions, including formal register — business correspondence comes out with Lei rather than tu — and the bureaucratic style of official documents. Neapolitan and Sicilian are distinct languages, not accents of Italian, and Polytranslator supports both as separate language pairs; if an old family record mixes dialect or Latin with Italian, the Advanced tier handles the mixture best. Modern written Italian is otherwise uniform nationwide, so there is no dialect choice to make for contemporary documents.

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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