Is the Sahidic Coptic 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 photograph of a papyrus, an ostracon or a manuscript page?

Only partly, and the results vary a lot with the hand. A clear literary uncial on a well-photographed codex leaf can give a usable reading of the legible lines; cursive documentary hands, abbreviations, faded ink and broken edges do not, and a confident-looking result may be invented. Almost every text you will meet has been edited with a transcription, and that transcription, or the printed edition, is what to upload; the photograph is for checking the transcription, not for replacing it.

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

Fast gives a rough sense of a passage in a clean edition. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the tier for Sahidic, where the conjugation bases (perfect, habitual, conditional, temporal, the second tenses) have to be kept apart, the supralinear strokes and nomina sacra read correctly, the Greek loanwords and particles that run through every text recognised, and the editor’s brackets respected. It is still a reading aid and not a substitute for a critical edition or a published scholarly translation, so check any line you will cite against one.

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. Facing-page editions and line-numbered texts with an apparatus are where the layout most often shifts.

Which Coptic dialects does it read: Sahidic, Bohairic, Lycopolitan, Fayyumic, Akhmimic?

Sahidic is the target of this page and the dialect with the most text behind it. Bohairic, the liturgical dialect of the Coptic Church, is close enough that a Bohairic page will be understood, but it has its own page and should be sent there. Lycopolitan (Subakhmimic), Akhmimic, Fayyumic and Mesokemic texts are read as Sahidic with variant spellings, which works for the shared vocabulary and less well where the dialect’s own forms appear; expect uneven results on the Lycopolitan tractates of Nag Hammadi and on Fayyumic documents, and lean on the edition.

Can it translate English into Sahidic Coptic?

Yes, as composition. A short exercise, a motto or a verse comes out in Sahidic with the standard orthography, and it is useful for checking a homework sentence or drafting a caption. Sahidic is known from a closed corpus, so anything that will be published, taught from or inscribed should be reviewed by someone who reads Coptic professionally. Treat the output as a draft that follows attested vocabulary and grammar, not as an ancient text.

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. Unicode Coptic and editions that print Coptic beside a Greek or English text are read from the text; pages in legacy Coptic fonts have a scrambled text layer and are better uploaded as images or an image-only scan. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters.

Sahidic Coptic PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Sahidic Coptic

Translate English to Sahidic Coptic or Sahidic Coptic 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 Sahidic Coptic documents come out

Read Sahidic Coptic in English from a critical edition, a grammar, a Nag Hammadi facsimile or a photograph of an ostracon, or turn a short English text into Sahidic for an exercise. Sahidic is the classical literary dialect of Coptic: the language of the earliest Coptic Bible, the Nag Hammadi codices, Shenoute and the monastic literature of Upper Egypt, and of thousands of letters and contracts on papyrus and potsherds. Clean typeset editions with word division and supralinear strokes usually come through well; photographs of manuscripts and cursive documentary hands are much harder, so prefer the published transcription.

Sahidic uses the Coptic alphabet, the Greek letters with the Demotic-derived ϣ, ϥ, ϩ, ϫ, ϭ and ϯ, and without the ϧ that marks Bohairic. Its most important mark is the supralinear stroke, a line over a consonant that forms a syllable on its own (ⲛ̄ⲧⲟϥ, ⲙ̄ⲡⲉϥ, ⲣ̄), sometimes drawn across a whole group of letters; older fonts and scanners lose it, and without it word division and grammar become ambiguous. Nomina sacra are abbreviated under a bar (ⲓ̅ⲥ̅, ⲭ̅ⲥ̅, ⲡ̅ⲛ̅ⲁ̅, ⲓ̅ⲏ̅ⲗ̅), and a diaeresis sits on ⲓ and ⲩ at the start of a syllable. Manuscripts were written without word division, so the divisions in an edition are the editor’s, and two editions of the same text can divide it differently. Editions use the bracket conventions of papyrology: square brackets for lost text, angle brackets for what the editor adds, braces for what the editor removes, and dots under uncertain letters. The Nag Hammadi codices are printed with Coptic and English on facing pages in the Coptic Gnostic Library, and their language is Sahidic with non-standard spellings, several tractates being Lycopolitan rather than Sahidic. Documentary texts on papyrus and ostraca are in cursive hands with abbreviations, Greek dating formulae and heavy Greek vocabulary. Many older PDFs were set in pre-Unicode Coptic fonts whose text layer is meaningless; upload those pages as images or as an image-only scan so the text is recognised from the picture rather than taken from the broken text layer.

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 Sahidic Coptic

Nag Hammadi and related codices

The thirteen codices found near Nag Hammadi in 1945 (the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Truth and the rest), the Berlin codex with the Gospel of Mary, and Codex Tchacos with the Gospel of Judas are the Sahidic texts most people come here to read, usually from the Coptic text in the Coptic Gnostic Library, from a facsimile page or from a class handout. Most are Sahidic with dialectal colouring; a few, including the Gospel of Truth, are Lycopolitan and read less evenly. The translation is a way to work through a passage beside the English of Meyer’s Nag Hammadi Scriptures or Robinson’s Nag Hammadi Library, not a replacement for either.

The Sahidic Bible

Sahidic carries the earliest Coptic translation of Scripture: the New Testament in Horner’s southern-dialect edition of 1911 to 1924 and later editions, the Psalms, the Old Testament books now being edited in Göttingen, and the Hamuli codices in the Morgan Library. Students of the Coptic versions upload chapters to compare with the Greek, and readers upload psalms and gospel passages for their own study. Printed text with clear supralinear strokes reads well; a photograph of a papyrus codex or a lectionary leaf is a different task, where the hand, the abbreviations and the damage make any reading a guess. For a citation, check the line against the printed edition.

Shenoute, Pachomius and the monastic writers

Shenoute of Atripe, the head of the White Monastery who died in the fifth century, left the largest body of original Coptic literature, his Canons and Discourses, in manuscripts now scattered across libraries in Europe and Egypt and reconstructed leaf by leaf. Pachomian rules and letters, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers in their Sahidic form, homilies, martyrdoms and lives of saints belong to the same world. These texts are long, rhetorical and full of Greek loanwords, and their editions often print a Sahidic text assembled from several fragments; the brackets and the editor’s notes matter, and a translation that reads smoothly across a lacuna is filling in what the editor did not.

Documentary texts, grammars and coursework

Letters, contracts, tax receipts and school exercises on papyrus and ostraca from Thebes (Jeme), Wadi Sarga, Bawit and elsewhere survive by the thousand from the sixth to the eighth century and are edited with photographs and transcriptions. Upload the transcription; the cursive hand itself is not something to expect a reading from. Coursework runs on Layton’s A Coptic Grammar, Lambdin’s Introduction to Sahidic Coptic, Plumley’s introductory grammar and Crum’s Coptic Dictionary, and learners upload exercises, paradigm tables and vocabulary lists in both directions. Composition from English into Sahidic works for short exercises and should be checked by a teacher. Bohairic, the dialect of the Coptic Church’s liturgy, has its own page.

Bohairic Coptic documents

What to watch for in Sahidic Coptic document translation

The supralinear stroke is the first trap: ⲛ̄ before a noun is a preposition or a plural article, ⲛ̄ inside a verb form is a negation or an object marker, and when a scan drops the stroke the reading has to be recovered from context. Word division is the second, because manuscripts have none and editors disagree, so a passage divided differently by two editions translates differently. Coptic grammar is carried by prefixes: the conjugation bases (ⲁ- perfect, ϣⲁⲣⲉ- habitual, ⲛ̄ⲧⲉⲣⲉ- temporal, ⲉⲣϣⲁⲛ- conditional, ⲙⲁⲣⲉ- jussive), the relative and circumstantial converters, and the second tenses that shift emphasis onto an adverb, and a word-by-word gloss reads all of them as one tense. Verbs change shape before a noun object and before a pronoun object (ⲥⲱⲧⲙ̄, ⲥⲉⲧⲙ̄-, ⲥⲟⲧⲙ̄⸗), so the same verb appears in three forms in one paragraph. Greek loanwords are everywhere: verbs borrowed in one fixed form, particles like ⲇⲉ and ⲅⲁⲣ carrying the argument, and in the Nag Hammadi texts a technical vocabulary (pleroma, aeon, archon) that editors usually leave untranslated for good reason. Nomina sacra must be expanded, and a bar over a letter can be a numeral instead. Documentary texts date by indiction and by the era formulas of Byzantine and early Islamic Egypt. Finally, editions mark what is lost and what is restored, and a translation is only as sound as the restoration it is translating; keep the brackets in sight.

Sahidic Coptic document translation FAQ

Is the Sahidic Coptic 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 photograph of a papyrus, an ostracon or a manuscript page?: Only partly, and the results vary a lot with the hand. A clear literary uncial on a well-photographed codex leaf can give a usable reading of the legible lines; cursive documentary hands, abbreviations, faded ink and broken edges do not, and a confident-looking result may be invented. Almost every text you will meet has been edited with a transcription, and that transcription, or the printed edition, is what to upload; the photograph is for checking the transcription, not for replacing it.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Fast gives a rough sense of a passage in a clean edition. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the tier for Sahidic, where the conjugation bases (perfect, habitual, conditional, temporal, the second tenses) have to be kept apart, the supralinear strokes and nomina sacra read correctly, the Greek loanwords and particles that run through every text recognised, and the editor’s brackets respected. It is still a reading aid and not a substitute for a critical edition or a published scholarly translation, so check any line you will cite against one.
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. Facing-page editions and line-numbered texts with an apparatus are where the layout most often shifts.
Which Coptic dialects does it read: Sahidic, Bohairic, Lycopolitan, Fayyumic, Akhmimic?: Sahidic is the target of this page and the dialect with the most text behind it. Bohairic, the liturgical dialect of the Coptic Church, is close enough that a Bohairic page will be understood, but it has its own page and should be sent there. Lycopolitan (Subakhmimic), Akhmimic, Fayyumic and Mesokemic texts are read as Sahidic with variant spellings, which works for the shared vocabulary and less well where the dialect’s own forms appear; expect uneven results on the Lycopolitan tractates of Nag Hammadi and on Fayyumic documents, and lean on the edition.
Can it translate English into Sahidic Coptic?: Yes, as composition. A short exercise, a motto or a verse comes out in Sahidic with the standard orthography, and it is useful for checking a homework sentence or drafting a caption. Sahidic is known from a closed corpus, so anything that will be published, taught from or inscribed should be reviewed by someone who reads Coptic professionally. Treat the output as a draft that follows attested vocabulary and grammar, not as an ancient text.
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. Unicode Coptic and editions that print Coptic beside a Greek or English text are read from the text; pages in legacy Coptic fonts have a scrambled text layer and are better uploaded as images or an image-only scan. 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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