Is the Old French 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 image?

Scanned PDFs and photos (JPG, PNG, HEIC) get text recognition first. A clean scan of a modern edition reads well; older printings can lose the acute and the tréma, which affects syllable count and occasionally the word. Manuscript folios are the hard case: Gothic bookhands, abbreviation strokes, uneven word spacing, and u/v and i/j written alike, so treat a translation from a facsimile as a first pass and check it against a printed edition or a diplomatic transcription.

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

Fast is for gist: skimming a chronicle or a long prose romance to find the passage you need. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for verse, legal texts and anything you will cite: it reads the two-case system (li rois as against le roi), resolves spelling variants and dialect forms, keeps the negation particles (ne ... pas, mie, point) and the many senses of si and or straight, and handles the formulaic diction of epic. It is still not a critical edition or a scholarly translation; use those for citation.

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. Line-numbered verse and facing-page editions are the cases to review: confirm that the translated lines still sit beside the right originals and that the apparatus has stayed at the foot of the page.

Can I use it for coursework or publication?

As a reading aid, yes. For coursework, your instructor wants your own translation, and most courses say so; use this the way you would use a glossary or a published translation, and follow the course rules. For publication or citation, work from a critical edition and a scholarly translation. The output here helps you get through an unfamiliar text; it is not a source to cite.

Which Old French does it handle: Francien, Picard, Anglo-Norman, Champenois?

All of them are Old French, and the translation follows the text you upload. Dialect shows mostly in spelling and a few forms: Picard keeps c where Francien has ch (cat for chat) and uses le as a feminine article; Anglo-Norman writes u for o and aun for an and simplifies the case system early; Champenois and Lorrain have their own vowel spellings. The same word can appear in half a dozen spellings within one text. Two things are not Old French: the Occitan of the troubadours, which has its own translator, and Middle French (Froissart, Villon, Christine de Pizan), which shades in gradually; readers of Middle French often upload it here too.

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 of a long romance with its apparatus and glossary can exceed the Free and Pro limit, so upload the section you need or use Scholar.

Old French PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Old French

Translate English to Old French or Old French 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 Old French documents come out

Upload an Old French PDF, Word file or scanned page and read it in English: a laisse of the Chanson de Roland, a stretch of Chrétien de Troyes, one of Marie de France's lais, a fabliau, a thirteenth-century charter, or a page of Anglo-Norman legal French. The translated file keeps the layout of the edition, with line numbers, notes and apparatus where they were. English into Old French is possible for short pieces, but for medieval texts the reading direction is the one that matters.

Old French is a Latin-alphabet language, but what you upload is almost always an edition, and editorial conventions shape the page. Critical editions in series such as the Classiques français du Moyen Âge, the Société des anciens textes français and Droz's Textes littéraires français add what the manuscripts lack: punctuation, capitals, word division, an acute on a final stressed e (chanté as against chante), a tréma to show that two vowels are separate syllables (veü, païs), and distinctions between u and v, i and j. Abbreviations are expanded, usually silently. Verse is printed in numbered lines, the assonanced laisses of the chansons de geste and the octosyllabic couplets of romance, and the foot of the page carries variant readings and rejected manuscript forms that should not be read as part of the text. Bilingual editions (the Lettres gothiques series, for example) set a modern French translation facing the original, so decide which column you want translated. Diplomatic transcriptions and manuscript facsimiles are different again: no accents, running abbreviations, and the letterforms of Gothic bookhands, so a photographed folio from Gallica reads far less reliably than a printed edition. Clean modern printings come through text recognition well; scanned nineteenth-century editions often lose the tréma and the acute, which changes syllable counts and sometimes words.

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 French

Chansons de geste and romance

The Chanson de Roland in the Oxford manuscript (Bodleian Digby 23, about 4,000 assonanced lines in an Anglo-Norman hand), the romances of Chrétien de Troyes (Erec et Enide, Cligès, Lancelot, Yvain, Perceval) in their octosyllabic couplets, the lais of Marie de France, Béroul's Tristan and the Roman de la Rose are the texts most students meet first. Upload the assigned laisses or the pages of your edition and read an English rendering next to the original. Verse is where the two-case system, the free word order and the formulaic diction do the most work, so use Advanced and compare against the edition's glossary and notes rather than treating the output as the last word.

Fabliaux, chronicles and devotional prose

Beyond the canon: the comic fabliaux of the thirteenth century, the beast epic of the Roman de Renart, the chantefable Aucassin et Nicolette in its Picard colouring, the prose chronicles of Villehardouin and Joinville, saints' lives, sermons, and the Bible translations and psalters that fill medieval library catalogues. Prose is more regular than verse and translates more predictably, but it is thick with names, titles and place names in medieval spellings (Costantinoble, Engleterre), and the chronicles count in the calendar of feast days, so check dates, names and numerals against the edition.

Charters, Anglo-Norman records and legal French

Charters in French appear around 1200 and multiply through the thirteenth century, and in England French was a language of law and administration for centuries after the Conquest: statutes, petitions, Year Book reports and later Law French in the courts, alongside Latin, which remained the language of most manorial and ecclesiastical records. Anglo-Norman has its own spellings (pur for por, aun for an) and a vocabulary of tenure, service and procedure with no clean modern equivalent, so expect retained terms with a gloss. The Anglo-Norman Dictionary is the reference to check against. Where a record is Latin with French insertions, the Latin document page covers the rest.

Latin documents

Editions, dictionaries and research

Medievalists and philologists work with the apparatus as much as the text: variant readings from other manuscripts, a glossary keyed to line numbers, an index of proper names, and introductions in modern French, German or Italian. A translated PDF keeps all that in place, which makes it practical to read an unfamiliar edition or a foreign-language introduction quickly and then go back to the text with Godefroy, Tobler-Lommatzsch, the DÉCT for Chrétien or the DMF for Middle French. The translation is a reading aid, not a substitute for a critical edition or a published scholarly translation, and citations should rest on those.

What to watch for in Old French document translation

The two-case system is the first trap: li murs is a subject and le mur an object in the singular, but li mur is a subject in the plural and les murs an object, and imparisyllabic nouns change more (ber and baron, sire and seignor, hom and home, Guenes and Guenelon), so a reader who applies modern French rules gets subjects and objects reversed. Spelling is unstandardised, and a text can write the same word as chevalier, chevaler and cevalier within a page. False friends with modern French are constant: rien began as 'thing' and only later meant 'nothing', gent is 'people' or 'noble', cuidier is 'think', moult is 'much', baron is 'man' or 'husband', chief is 'head', viande is 'food' of any kind, vilain is 'peasant', sergent is 'servant', and si often means 'then' or 'and', not 'if'. Verbs carry more information than in modern French: the simple past and the historic present alternate freely in narrative, and the subjunctive appears where modern usage would not use it. Verse editions also carry a critical apparatus at the foot of the page, which must not be translated as though it were prose. Finally, proper names in medieval spelling (Guenes for Ganelon, Marsilie for Marsile, Engleterre for England) should be kept recognisable rather than 'translated', and place names identified rather than modernised at a guess.

Old French document translation FAQ

Is the Old French 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 image?: Scanned PDFs and photos (JPG, PNG, HEIC) get text recognition first. A clean scan of a modern edition reads well; older printings can lose the acute and the tréma, which affects syllable count and occasionally the word. Manuscript folios are the hard case: Gothic bookhands, abbreviation strokes, uneven word spacing, and u/v and i/j written alike, so treat a translation from a facsimile as a first pass and check it against a printed edition or a diplomatic transcription.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Fast is for gist: skimming a chronicle or a long prose romance to find the passage you need. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for verse, legal texts and anything you will cite: it reads the two-case system (li rois as against le roi), resolves spelling variants and dialect forms, keeps the negation particles (ne ... pas, mie, point) and the many senses of si and or straight, and handles the formulaic diction of epic. It is still not a critical edition or a scholarly translation; use those for citation.
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. Line-numbered verse and facing-page editions are the cases to review: confirm that the translated lines still sit beside the right originals and that the apparatus has stayed at the foot of the page.
Can I use it for coursework or publication?: As a reading aid, yes. For coursework, your instructor wants your own translation, and most courses say so; use this the way you would use a glossary or a published translation, and follow the course rules. For publication or citation, work from a critical edition and a scholarly translation. The output here helps you get through an unfamiliar text; it is not a source to cite.
Which Old French does it handle: Francien, Picard, Anglo-Norman, Champenois?: All of them are Old French, and the translation follows the text you upload. Dialect shows mostly in spelling and a few forms: Picard keeps c where Francien has ch (cat for chat) and uses le as a feminine article; Anglo-Norman writes u for o and aun for an and simplifies the case system early; Champenois and Lorrain have their own vowel spellings. The same word can appear in half a dozen spellings within one text. Two things are not Old French: the Occitan of the troubadours, which has its own translator, and Middle French (Froissart, Villon, Christine de Pizan), which shades in gradually; readers of Middle French often upload it here too.
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 of a long romance with its apparatus and glossary can exceed 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

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