Is the Old English 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 edition or a manuscript facsimile?

Scans and photos (JPG, PNG, HEIC, or a scanned PDF) get text recognition before translation. A clean scan of a printed edition, with þ, ð, æ and macrons, usually reads well; a worn library copy may lose macrons or turn thorn into p, so check names and long vowels. Facsimiles of Insular minuscule, with their abbreviations, letterforms and damage, are unreliable to read from an image. If you have the text in a printed edition or as typed Unicode, upload that instead.

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

Fast gives a quick gist of straightforward prose, which is fine for skimming an annal or a homily. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for verse and anything you will cite or hand in: it tracks case endings and word order, resolves poetic apposition and kennings from context, keeps dialect and period spellings in view, and handles the Roman numerals, Latin insertions and abbreviations of edited texts. It is still not a substitute for a critical edition or a published scholarly translation, so for citation compare it with one.

Will the translation keep my document's 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. Verse editions are the stress test: check that half-lines and line numbers are still paired with the right text, and that footnotes and apparatus have stayed at the foot of the page.

Can I use this for a class assignment or a publication?

As a reading aid and a check on your own parsing, yes. For an assignment, your instructor almost certainly wants your translation, not one produced here, and courses often say so explicitly, so use it the way you would use a dictionary or a published translation and follow your course's rules. For anything you publish or cite, work from a critical edition and a scholarly translation; this tool helps you get through the text, it does not replace them.

Which Old English does it read: West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian or Kentish?

Whatever your document contains. Most surviving texts, and nearly everything in student anthologies, are in Late West Saxon, which is the form textbooks describe. Early texts and Anglian material (the Northumbrian gospel glosses, the Mercian gloss in the Vespasian Psalter, Cædmon's Hymn in its Northumbrian version) use different spellings and forms, and late texts shade into early Middle English; the translation follows the text, but expect more to check outside the West Saxon mainstream. Going into Old English, Late West Saxon is the form to ask for and to check against.

What file types can I upload?

PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX, XLSX 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. A complete edition with glossary and notes can run past the Free and Pro limit, so upload the section you need or use Scholar.

Old English PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Old English

Translate English to Old English or Old English 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.

Loading credits…

Translate into

Drag and drop a file here, or click to browse

PDF
DOCX
PPTX
XLSX
EPUB
JPG
PNG
TXT

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

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 Old English documents come out

Upload an Old English PDF, Word file, scan or photographed page and read it in Modern English: an edition of Beowulf or the Exeter Book elegies, a stretch of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, one of Ælfric's homilies, a charter with its boundary clause, or the handout your instructor set for next week. The translated file keeps the page layout, so line numbers, glosses and notes stay where the original put them. The other direction, Modern English into Old English, works for short texts and is discussed below.

Old English was written in the Latin alphabet with four extra letters: thorn (þ) and eth (ð), used interchangeably for th, ash (æ), and wynn (ƿ) for w. Nearly every modern edition replaces wynn with w, and student editions (Mitchell and Robinson, Baker) and Klaeber's Beowulf add marks the scribes never used: macrons on long vowels (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, ȳ, ǣ) and, in some series, dots over palatal ċ and ġ. A clean PDF of such an edition, with þ, ð and æ encoded as real characters, comes through text recognition well. Older printings scanned from library copies are less reliable: thorn is often misread as p, and macrons drift or vanish. Manuscript facsimiles are a different matter. Insular minuscule has its own shapes for s, r, f and g, uses the Tironian sign ⁊ for and, a crossed thorn (ꝥ) for þæt and a stroke over a vowel for a following m or n, and the Beowulf manuscript (Cotton Vitellius A.xv) was scorched in the 1731 Cotton fire and lost letters from its crumbling edges before it was rebound in the nineteenth century. Treat readings from a facsimile as a starting point to check against a printed edition. Poetry adds one more wrinkle: manuscripts write verse continuously like prose, so the lineation, half-lines and caesura you see in an edition are editorial.

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 Old English

Beowulf and the poetic codices

Most Old English poetry survives in four manuscripts: the Beowulf manuscript, the Exeter Book (the riddles, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament, Deor), the Junius manuscript (Genesis, Exodus, Daniel) and the Vercelli Book (The Dream of the Rood, Elene, Andreas). Students working through Beowulf in Klaeber's edition, or through the elegies in an anthology, upload the pages they are assigned and read a Modern English rendering alongside the original. Poetic compounds and kennings (hronrād, whale-road, for the sea; bānhūs, bone-house, for the body), apposition and the alliterative half-line all need context to come out right, so use Advanced for verse and compare the result with your own parse and the glossary.

The Chronicle, homilies and Alfred's circle

The prose corpus is large and much of it is read for history and theology rather than literature: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in its several manuscripts (the Peterborough copy runs on to 1154, into early Middle English), Ælfric's Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints, Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, and the translations associated with King Alfred's court, including the preface to the Pastoral Care and the Old English Bede and Boethius. These texts are more regular than verse and translate more predictably. Annals dated with Her (in this year) and Roman numerals, Latin passages inside the English, and scriptural references are the details to check.

Charters, wills, laws and place names

Historians, local historians and place-name researchers meet Old English in documents rather than literature: the vernacular boundary clauses attached to Latin charters (catalogued by Sawyer number), wills, writs and manumissions, and the law codes from Æthelberht of Kent (preserved only in the twelfth-century Textus Roffensis) to Alfred's domboc and the codes of Cnut. Vocabulary here is technical (bōcland, wergild, hīd, ceorl, þegn) and often has no clean modern equivalent, so expect a retained term with a gloss rather than a one-word swap. Many charters are Latin with only the bounds in English; the Latin document translator covers that side of the page.

Modern English into Old English

A large share of visitors arrive wanting the reverse: a motto, a name, a line of dialogue, a short passage for a class exercise, or text for a piece of art rendered in Old English. That direction works here for documents too, but it is composition rather than translation. Old English has no words for most modern things, so the result relies on calques and period vocabulary, and it should be reviewed by someone who reads the language before you print or carve it. Two common mix-ups: Shakespeare's language is Early Modern English, not Old English, and Chaucer's is Middle English; both have their own pages. For text in runes, the runes page explains the Anglo-Saxon futhorc and what rendering text in runes does and does not mean.

What to watch for in Old English document translation

Old English is inflected, and most bad translations come from ignoring the endings. Case, not word order, says who did what to whom, so a sentence that fronts the object (þone cyning ofslōh se eorl: the nobleman killed the king) has to be unscrambled rather than read left to right. Poetry compounds the problem with apposition, where the same person or thing is named three ways in a row, and with kennings that are riddles in miniature. Vocabulary is the second trap, because false friends run right through the language: sellan is to give, not sell; dēor is any animal; wīf is a woman; mete is food; cniht is a boy or servant; drēam is joy; sōna means at once; wyrd is what happens, and only sometimes fate. Spelling varies by dialect and date, so West Saxon eald and ealdor stand beside Anglian ald and aldor, and late texts drop endings on the way to Middle English. Editorial marks matter: macrons distinguish gōd (good) from god (God), and losing them in a rough scan changes meanings. Finally, Roman numerals, Latin sentences dropped into the English, and abbreviations such as ⁊ and ꝥ appear in edited prose as well as in facsimiles and should be read for what they are, not skipped.

Old English document translation FAQ

Is the Old English 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 edition or a manuscript facsimile?: Scans and photos (JPG, PNG, HEIC, or a scanned PDF) get text recognition before translation. A clean scan of a printed edition, with þ, ð, æ and macrons, usually reads well; a worn library copy may lose macrons or turn thorn into p, so check names and long vowels. Facsimiles of Insular minuscule, with their abbreviations, letterforms and damage, are unreliable to read from an image. If you have the text in a printed edition or as typed Unicode, upload that instead.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Fast gives a quick gist of straightforward prose, which is fine for skimming an annal or a homily. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for verse and anything you will cite or hand in: it tracks case endings and word order, resolves poetic apposition and kennings from context, keeps dialect and period spellings in view, and handles the Roman numerals, Latin insertions and abbreviations of edited texts. It is still not a substitute for a critical edition or a published scholarly translation, so for citation compare it with one.
Will the translation keep my document's 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. Verse editions are the stress test: check that half-lines and line numbers are still paired with the right text, and that footnotes and apparatus have stayed at the foot of the page.
Can I use this for a class assignment or a publication?: As a reading aid and a check on your own parsing, yes. For an assignment, your instructor almost certainly wants your translation, not one produced here, and courses often say so explicitly, so use it the way you would use a dictionary or a published translation and follow your course's rules. For anything you publish or cite, work from a critical edition and a scholarly translation; this tool helps you get through the text, it does not replace them.
Which Old English does it read: West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian or Kentish?: Whatever your document contains. Most surviving texts, and nearly everything in student anthologies, are in Late West Saxon, which is the form textbooks describe. Early texts and Anglian material (the Northumbrian gospel glosses, the Mercian gloss in the Vespasian Psalter, Cædmon's Hymn in its Northumbrian version) use different spellings and forms, and late texts shade into early Middle English; the translation follows the text, but expect more to check outside the West Saxon mainstream. Going into Old English, Late West Saxon is the form to ask for and to check against.
What file types can I upload?: PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX, XLSX 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. A complete edition with glossary and notes can run past the Free and Pro limit, so upload the section you need or use Scholar.

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

Translate documents in other languages

Arabic documents Aramaic documents Moroccan Arabic documents Egyptian Arabic documents Bavarian documents Bengali documents Binary Code documents Bohairic Coptic documents Breton documents Braille documents Old English text translator All document translation