Is the Quechua 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 Quechua pages?

Yes. Upload a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo or a scanned PDF, and the text is recognized before translation. Printed textbooks, leaflets and modern editions come through well when the scan is sharp. Two things to watch: the apostrophes marking ejectives (p', t', k', q', ch') in Cusco-Collao and Bolivian texts are small and easily lost or misread as quotation marks, and old facsimiles in colonial type or handwriting vary a lot. Check proper names, numbers and apostrophes against the original.

How accurate is the Quechua translation, and when should I use Advanced?

Quechua has less written material than the big languages machine translation was built on, so expect a solid working translation rather than a polished one. Fast is fine for the gist of a school page or a notice. Advanced runs a frontier model and handles the things that go wrong most: long suffix chains parsed correctly, evidentials kept as I saw, they say or perhaps instead of dropped, the inclusive and exclusive we (ñuqanchik, ñuqayku) told apart, and spelling variants recognized as the same word. Use Advanced for anything you will publish, teach or submit, and have a speaker review Quechua output.

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. Quechua text usually runs longer than English, so headings and table cells in a file translated into Quechua are the places to look first.

Is this a certified translation for Peruvian or Bolivian authorities?

No. It is not a certified translation, and institutions that require Quechua documents or interpretation, such as courts and the civil registry, rely on registered translators and interpreters. Use it to understand a document, prepare a draft or check a translation you were given, then have any official submission produced or reviewed by a registered translator.

Which Quechua does it use: Ayacucho, Cusco, Bolivian or Ecuadorian Kichwa?

The translator is labelled Quechua and its reference variety is Southern Quechua of the Ayacucho (Chanka) type, the basis of the quy language code it is built on. Cusco-Collao and Bolivian Quechua are close relatives sharing most vocabulary and grammar; their texts are read and translated, but output into Quechua tends toward Ayacucho spelling, so Cusco ejectives and five-vowel spelling may need editing, and a few common words differ (yaku and unu for water). Ecuadorian Kichwa and the Central Quechua of Ancash and Huánuco are further away, and accuracy on those texts drops. Have a speaker from the target community check anything written for them.

What file types can I upload, and can the target be Spanish instead of English?

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. Choose Spanish in the target-language picker to translate a Quechua document into Spanish, or upload a Spanish file and choose Quechua; for the many documents that are already bilingual, the Spanish column is the quickest check on the output.

Quechua PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Quechua

Translate English to Quechua or Quechua 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 Quechua documents come out

Translate a Quechua PDF, Word document or scanned page into English, or an English file into Quechua. Upload bilingual school materials, official forms, catechisms and church texts, song lyrics, oral-history transcripts or a photographed page, and download a translated file that keeps the original layout. The translator is labelled simply Quechua and works with Southern Quechua (Ayacucho, Cusco and Bolivia), varieties close enough to share a written standard. Most Quechua documents sit beside Spanish, and you can pick Spanish rather than English as the target.

Quechua is written in the Latin alphabet, but there is no single spelling, and that matters more for documents than for speech. Peru's official alphabet of 1985 and Bolivia's of 1984 use three vowels (a, i, u), so words are spelled quri, Qusqu and runa simi; the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua in Cusco and much popular writing use five vowels (qori, Qosqo), writing the vowel lowering that happens next to the uvular q. Cusco-Collao and Bolivian texts also mark aspirated and ejective consonants (ph, p', qh, q', ch') that Ayacucho Quechua does not have. Older material is different again: colonial and nineteenth-century texts follow the Spanish conventions of their day (huasi for wasi, ccori for quri, qquichua for the language), and dictionaries and Bibles from different decades each settle on a system of their own. A single document can mix systems, and place names keep their Spanish forms (Cusco, Ayacucho) regardless. Quechua is agglutinative, so words run long and a line of Quechua often carries more than a line of Spanish or English; translated pages change length accordingly, and the layout adjusts type size and line breaks to fit. Scanned textbooks, mimeographed church leaflets and typewritten transcripts are common inputs. Clean print is read well; faint pages and handwriting need checking against the original.

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 Quechua

Bilingual education (EIB) materials

Peru's intercultural bilingual education programme publishes textbooks, readers and teacher guides in Quechua Chanka and Quechua Collao, Bolivia's plurinational education system produces materials in its own standard, and NGOs and universities add readers, dictionaries and teacher-training packs on top. Teachers, parents and researchers bring these here to read a Quechua text in English or Spanish, or to draft a worksheet in Quechua from an English or Spanish source. The layout of a textbook page, with its illustrations, exercises and vocabulary boxes, is kept in the translated file. Because spelling norms differ by country and programme, check the output against the norm your school uses before handing it to pupils.

Official forms, notices and translated laws

Quechua is an official language in Bolivia and, in the regions where it predominates, in Peru, and public bodies increasingly publish forms, health information, election material and summaries of laws in it alongside the Spanish originals. Court interpreters, health workers, municipal staff and NGO field teams translate in both directions: a Spanish or English notice into Quechua for a community, or a Quechua statement, complaint or survey response back into Spanish or English. Upload the PDF or Word file and choose the target you need. For anything with legal weight the result is a working draft; Peru maintains a national registry of indigenous-language translators and interpreters, and an official submission should go through a registered translator.

Spanish document translator

Colonial and historical texts

The earliest Quechua books are also the earliest printed in South America: the Doctrina Christiana y catecismo of 1584, printed in Lima in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara after the Third Council of Lima, preceded in Spain by Domingo de Santo Tomás's grammar and lexicon of 1560. Later come González Holguín's dictionary of 1608, the Huarochirí manuscript, the drama Ollantay and two centuries of sermons, catechisms and hymnals. Students and historians upload facsimile scans and modern editions of these to get a first English reading. Colonial spelling, the archaic ecclesiastical register and the Cusco-based lengua general of the period all differ from modern Quechua, so treat the output as a study aid, not a substitute for a scholarly edition and its published translation.

Songs, oral histories and family papers

Huayno and harawi lyrics, church hymns, testimonio narratives, transcripts of interviews with grandparents and community elders, and the letters and land papers of migrant families make up a large share of the Quechua documents people translate. Many are transcriptions of speech, so they carry dialect features, Spanish loanwords, code-switching mid-sentence and the evidential suffixes (-mi, -si, -chá) that mark whether the speaker saw something, heard of it or supposes it, all of which need to survive into English. Upload the transcript as a document or a photograph of the page. The Advanced tier keeps those distinctions more reliably; on any tier, keep the original beside the output and have a speaker check idioms and song lines.

What to watch for in Quechua document translation

Quechua's traps are morphological and orthographic. A word like wasiykichikmantapas (from your house too, said to several people) is one token carrying possession, number, case and also, and a translator that segments the suffixes wrongly produces confident nonsense; the suffixes also encode who does what to whom (-yki, -wa, -sunki), so a single misparse flips subject and object. Evidentials are dropped or overtranslated: -mi marks direct knowledge, -si hearsay, -chá conjecture, and English needs different framing for each, while the topic marker -qa has no English equivalent and should shape emphasis rather than become a word. The inclusive and exclusive we merge in English but must be chosen correctly when translating into Quechua. Spelling variation means one word can appear as quri, qori and ccori in three sources, and five-vowel versus three-vowel spelling shows which norm a text follows, which a translation into Quechua should respect. Spanish loanwords are everywhere in modern text (iskuyla, siñura, or simply escuela, señora), sometimes with Quechua suffixes attached, and older religious texts use a Cusco-flavoured colonial standard with archaic vocabulary. Keep the original beside the output, watch proper names and numbers, and treat songs and proverbs as places where a literal rendering can miss the point.

Quechua document translation FAQ

Is the Quechua 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 Quechua pages?: Yes. Upload a JPG, PNG or HEIC photo or a scanned PDF, and the text is recognized before translation. Printed textbooks, leaflets and modern editions come through well when the scan is sharp. Two things to watch: the apostrophes marking ejectives (p', t', k', q', ch') in Cusco-Collao and Bolivian texts are small and easily lost or misread as quotation marks, and old facsimiles in colonial type or handwriting vary a lot. Check proper names, numbers and apostrophes against the original.
How accurate is the Quechua translation, and when should I use Advanced?: Quechua has less written material than the big languages machine translation was built on, so expect a solid working translation rather than a polished one. Fast is fine for the gist of a school page or a notice. Advanced runs a frontier model and handles the things that go wrong most: long suffix chains parsed correctly, evidentials kept as I saw, they say or perhaps instead of dropped, the inclusive and exclusive we (ñuqanchik, ñuqayku) told apart, and spelling variants recognized as the same word. Use Advanced for anything you will publish, teach or submit, and have a speaker review Quechua output.
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. Quechua text usually runs longer than English, so headings and table cells in a file translated into Quechua are the places to look first.
Is this a certified translation for Peruvian or Bolivian authorities?: No. It is not a certified translation, and institutions that require Quechua documents or interpretation, such as courts and the civil registry, rely on registered translators and interpreters. Use it to understand a document, prepare a draft or check a translation you were given, then have any official submission produced or reviewed by a registered translator.
Which Quechua does it use: Ayacucho, Cusco, Bolivian or Ecuadorian Kichwa?: The translator is labelled Quechua and its reference variety is Southern Quechua of the Ayacucho (Chanka) type, the basis of the quy language code it is built on. Cusco-Collao and Bolivian Quechua are close relatives sharing most vocabulary and grammar; their texts are read and translated, but output into Quechua tends toward Ayacucho spelling, so Cusco ejectives and five-vowel spelling may need editing, and a few common words differ (yaku and unu for water). Ecuadorian Kichwa and the Central Quechua of Ancash and Huánuco are further away, and accuracy on those texts drops. Have a speaker from the target community check anything written for them.
What file types can I upload, and can the target be Spanish instead of English?: 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. Choose Spanish in the target-language picker to translate a Quechua document into Spanish, or upload a Spanish file and choose Quechua; for the many documents that are already bilingual, the Spanish column is the quickest check on the output.

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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