Is the Navajo 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 or photographed Navajo documents?

Yes. Upload a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo or a scanned PDF; the text is recognized from the image before it is translated. The diacritics are the weak point of any scan: a faint ogonek under a vowel or a small acute accent can be lost at low resolution, and Navajo has pairs that depend on them (azeeʼ is medicine, azééʼ is mouth). Scan at high resolution, keep the page flat and evenly lit, and check marked vowels in names and key terms. Handwriting varies a lot and is handled as well as it can be, not reliably.

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

Navajo is well documented but has little parallel text for machine translation to learn from, and its verbs are the hard part: a single verb carries subject, object, aspect and mode, and often the shape or nature of the thing handled, built from a long chain of prefixes, and the yi-/bi- alternation decides who did what to whom. Fast gives a workable gist of a printed page. Advanced runs a frontier model and is considerably better at parsing those verb forms, keeping diacritics consistent and handling church and school vocabulary, so use it for anything you will rely on. In either tier, translations into Navajo need a fluent speaker's review before use.

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. When the target is Navajo, the output uses standard Unicode characters for marked vowels, ł and the glottal stop rather than a custom font encoding, so it should copy correctly out of a Word file; check a rendered PDF for any mark that failed to display.

Can I use this for legal, medical or official documents?

Use it to understand and prepare, not to submit. It is not a certified translation, and courts, clinics and tribal offices that need Navajo interpretation have their own standards, usually a qualified Navajo interpreter or translator. Where you need a Navajo version of a consent form, a notice or a legal text, treat the output here as a draft for a certified or community-recognized translator to review.

Is there more than one kind of Navajo?

Navajo is one language with modest regional variation across the Navajo Nation and off-reservation communities, and its writing is standardized by the Young and Morgan orthography, so a translated document is understood everywhere Navajo is read. The variation you will actually meet is generational and stylistic: older speakers and older texts use fuller verb forms and fewer English loans, while younger writers mix in more English. Spelling inconsistency in older documents is a bigger practical issue than dialect.

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. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters.

Navajo PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Navajo

Translate English to Navajo or Navajo 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 Navajo documents come out

Translate a Navajo (Diné bizaad) PDF, Word document or scanned page into English, or an English file into Navajo. Upload school and language-class materials, church texts, letters, chapter notices or a photographed page, and download a translated file that keeps the original layout. Reading Navajo into English is the more common direction. English into Navajo works for notices, worksheets and short texts, but the Navajo verb is demanding enough that anything you will teach, post or publish should be checked by a fluent speaker before it goes out.

Navajo is written in the Latin alphabet using the orthography standardized by Robert W. Young and William Morgan in the 1940s, and its diacritics carry meaning rather than decoration. High tone is marked with an acute accent (á), nasal vowels with a hook, the ogonek, under the letter (ą), and the two combine (ą́); long vowels are written double (aa), with falling and rising tones on long vowels shown by accenting one half (áa, aá). The apostrophe writes the glottal stop and the ejective consonants (tʼ, kʼ, tsʼ, chʼ, tłʼ), and the barred ł stands for a sound English lacks. Ordinary keyboards and fonts have never handled this well, so real documents are inconsistent. Older files were typed in custom fonts that placed hooks and accents on unused characters, so text copied from them comes out with the wrong letters; many pages drop the marks entirely; ł turns up as l; and the apostrophe may be the straight ASCII mark, a curly quotation mark or the proper modifier letter. Documents in a pre-Young-and-Morgan spelling, such as early twentieth-century mission publications that wrote Navaho, differ again. If text copied from a PDF comes out wrong, upload a scan or screenshot of the page instead so it is read from the image, where a clean, well-typeset page usually does well.

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 Navajo

School, immersion and language-class materials

Navajo-language teaching has a long paper trail: readers and worksheets from the bilingual programs that began at Rough Rock and Rock Point in the 1960s and 1970s, Diné College course packs, immersion-school handouts, and the vocabulary lists and dialogues used in Navajo classes at schools and universities across the Southwest. Teachers translate English worksheets and notices into Navajo, and learners upload Navajo readers to check their understanding. Use the output as a study aid and a draft. Verb forms are where machine translation of Navajo is weakest, so a fluent speaker or a Navajo-language teacher should review anything that will be handed to students.

Scripture, hymns and church materials

The Navajo Bible, Diyin God Bizaad, is one of the longest texts ever written in the language, and it anchors a large body of church material: hymnals, Sunday school lessons, tracts, funeral and memorial programs and bilingual bulletins used by congregations across the Navajo Nation and in border towns. Because scripture and hymn translations fixed many Navajo religious terms, a translation that treats them literally, taking a compound back to its parts, can read oddly to people who know the standard wording. Upload the page, use the Advanced tier for anything you will read aloud or print, and compare key terms with the wording your congregation already uses.

Letters, notices and Navajo Nation paperwork

Chapter house notices, election flyers, health and public-safety information, program brochures and personal letters are the everyday Navajo documents people bring here. Much official writing on the Navajo Nation is in English, including the Navajo Times and most council and court documents, with Navajo terms embedded, so a file is often bilingual or mixed rather than entirely Navajo. Mixed pages can be uploaded as they are; check the English passages afterward, since a translator can lightly reword text that was already in the target language. For a flyer or notice going the other way, English into Navajo, expect a translation that needs a speaker's review for tone and for the descriptive constructions Navajo uses where English has a single technical noun.

Code talker history and family records

Interest in the Navajo Code Talkers brings people to memoirs, oral-history transcripts, museum labels and the Marine Corps code dictionary itself. A note of caution: the code was a cipher built on Navajo, not written Navajo. Its word lists used the Marines' own improvised spellings rather than standard orthography, and translating them gives the literal meanings (a turtle, an iron fish) rather than the military ones (a tank, a submarine), which were assigned by the code and are documented in English sources. Genealogy runs into the same pattern: census, allotment, boarding-school and military records were kept in English, so the Navajo-language pieces in a family's papers are usually letters, hymn sheets or song texts, worth translating but read alongside the English record.

What to watch for in Navajo document translation

The specific traps in Navajo document translation start with the marks. Tone, nasality and vowel length are not optional: dropping or misreading them merges distinct words, and older files typed in custom fonts scramble exactly those characters, so a translator that trusts the copied text of an old PDF is working from corrupted input. The verb is the next trap. Navajo builds its verbs from a fixed template of prefixes, and the same stem appears in imperfective, perfective, iterative and other modes with different meanings; the yi-/bi- alternation, tied to which participant ranks higher in animacy, tells you who acted on whom, and a translator that misreads it silently reverses the sentence. Classificatory verbs add a further layer: Navajo uses different verbs for handling a solid roundish object, a slender flexible object, a liquid in a container or an animate being, so give or carry in English has many Navajo forms, and a machine picks wrong with no obvious sign. Nouns are often descriptive verb phrases (a telephone is metal one talks with), which can come back into English as a literal phrase instead of the noun. Going into Navajo, expect coined descriptions for technical terms and a formal register absorbed from scripture and school texts. Keep the source beside the output and have a speaker check anything that matters.

Navajo document translation FAQ

Is the Navajo 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 or photographed Navajo documents?: Yes. Upload a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo or a scanned PDF; the text is recognized from the image before it is translated. The diacritics are the weak point of any scan: a faint ogonek under a vowel or a small acute accent can be lost at low resolution, and Navajo has pairs that depend on them (azeeʼ is medicine, azééʼ is mouth). Scan at high resolution, keep the page flat and evenly lit, and check marked vowels in names and key terms. Handwriting varies a lot and is handled as well as it can be, not reliably.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Navajo is well documented but has little parallel text for machine translation to learn from, and its verbs are the hard part: a single verb carries subject, object, aspect and mode, and often the shape or nature of the thing handled, built from a long chain of prefixes, and the yi-/bi- alternation decides who did what to whom. Fast gives a workable gist of a printed page. Advanced runs a frontier model and is considerably better at parsing those verb forms, keeping diacritics consistent and handling church and school vocabulary, so use it for anything you will rely on. In either tier, translations into Navajo need a fluent speaker's review before use.
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. When the target is Navajo, the output uses standard Unicode characters for marked vowels, ł and the glottal stop rather than a custom font encoding, so it should copy correctly out of a Word file; check a rendered PDF for any mark that failed to display.
Can I use this for legal, medical or official documents?: Use it to understand and prepare, not to submit. It is not a certified translation, and courts, clinics and tribal offices that need Navajo interpretation have their own standards, usually a qualified Navajo interpreter or translator. Where you need a Navajo version of a consent form, a notice or a legal text, treat the output here as a draft for a certified or community-recognized translator to review.
Is there more than one kind of Navajo?: Navajo is one language with modest regional variation across the Navajo Nation and off-reservation communities, and its writing is standardized by the Young and Morgan orthography, so a translated document is understood everywhere Navajo is read. The variation you will actually meet is generational and stylistic: older speakers and older texts use fuller verb forms and fewer English loans, while younger writers mix in more English. Spelling inconsistency in older documents is a bigger practical issue than dialect.
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. 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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