Is it free to translate a PDF from English to Vietnamese?

Free daily credits let you try document translation without an account. The uploader shows the credit cost before you translate. The upload limits without an account and on Free or Pro are 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar allows 50MB and 1,000,000 characters. A file within those limits may still need more credits than your free balance. Pro and Scholar include monthly credits, and credit packs are also available.

Can it read scanned or photographed Vietnamese documents?

Yes. Upload a photo or scan (JPG, PNG, or HEIC) or a scanned PDF and we run text recognition before translating. Vietnamese is a demanding OCR target — tone marks stack on top of vowel marks, and a smudge can turn ơ into o or one tone into another — so scan quality matters more than it does for English. Straight-on, well-lit photos of printed documents work well, including pages with the red official seals that overlap text on Vietnamese paperwork. Faint dot-matrix printing on older certificates and handwriting are the hard cases: expect a usable draft, and check names and numbers against the original.

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

Fast is built for volume and gist — skimming a report or working through a stack of records. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for anything you will act on: it keeps the pronoun and address system consistent (Vietnamese has no neutral "you" — a document that switches between ông, bà, anh, and em reads as broken), renders formal Sino-Vietnamese legal vocabulary as real legal English instead of literal fragments, and preserves tone-mark distinctions that separate one word from another. For contracts, certificates, and anything legal, use Advanced.

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. The credit cost is shown before you translate. Right-to-left, vertical and complex scripts are handled in the formatted output.

Can I use this for USCIS, a consulate, or Vietnamese authorities?

Not directly. US agencies like USCIS require a translation with a signed certification of accuracy, and Vietnamese authorities generally require notarized translations (công chứng bản dịch) done through a justice office or authorized translation provider in Vietnam. Use Polytranslator to understand your documents, prepare drafts, and work out which pages actually need official treatment — then pay for certification only where it's required. That is usually far cheaper than certifying an entire folder blind.

Which Vietnamese do I get — Northern or Southern?

Standard written Vietnamese, which is shared across the country and understood everywhere: the North–South split is mostly pronunciation plus everyday vocabulary (lợn/heo for pig, ô/dù for umbrella, bố/ba for dad), and formal documents largely avoid those words anyway. One nuance matters for diaspora families: overseas communities formed largely from the pre-1975 South and some prefer older Southern usage (ghi danh rather than đăng ký for "register," for example), while documents from Vietnam today use current official vocabulary. Translations here follow the modern standard; if the output is going to an older Southern-diaspora audience, a quick vocabulary pass is worth it.

What file types can I upload?

PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX (PowerPoint), XLSX (Excel), and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned documents as JPG, PNG, or HEIC. The translated file retains the workbook or presentation structure. One Vietnamese-specific tip: PDFs created in Vietnam before the mid-2000s often use pre-Unicode fonts (TCVN3, VNI) whose text extracts as gibberish — if a file looks garbled when you copy from it, upload it as a scan or photo instead and let text recognition read the page image. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters. Translation is limited by your credit balance.

Vietnamese PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Vietnamese

Translate English to Vietnamese or Vietnamese to English while preserving your document’s layout. Upload your file, choose the target language, and review the credit quote.

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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 Vietnamese documents come out

Upload a PDF, Word file, or a photo of a paper document and get an English-to-Vietnamese translation in minutes — or turn a Vietnamese birth certificate, land-use certificate, or supplier contract into plain English. Choose clean translated text to read, or the same file back with its layout preserved — you decide before translating. Both directions work: English to Vietnamese and Vietnamese to English.

Vietnamese is written in chữ Quốc ngữ, a Latin alphabet, left to right — so nothing needs mirroring, and the letters look familiar. The catch is the diacritics. Vietnamese stacks two layers of marks on its vowels: quality marks that create distinct letters (ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư, plus đ) and five tone marks on top of those, so a single vowel can carry two marks at once (ề, ậ, ở, ữ). Six tones mean the marks are not decoration — ma, má, mà, mả, mã, and mạ are six different words. That has practical consequences for documents: fonts without full Vietnamese support drop or misplace marks, tight line spacing in forms clips them, and OCR on a blurry scan confuses ơ with o or a hỏi tone with a ngã. Older digital documents add an encoding trap — Vietnamese PDFs made before Unicode won out often use legacy TCVN3 or VNI fonts, and their text extracts as gibberish unless the file is treated as an image. Vietnamese also puts spaces between syllables rather than words (đại học, "university," is one word in two pieces), writes dates as DD/MM/YYYY, and traditionally uses the French-style decimal comma (1.234.567,89). Go back far enough and the script changes entirely: before the 20th century, Vietnamese records were written in chữ Hán and chữ Nôm — Chinese-style characters most Vietnamese readers today cannot read at all.

Translate your document and keep its structure

The translator keeps your file’s structure and shows the credit quote before you start. 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 Vietnamese

Immigration and family paperwork

Vietnam is consistently one of the top sources of family-based immigration to the United States, and the Vietnamese diaspora — over two million people in the US, with large communities in Australia, Canada, France, and Germany — generates a steady stream of document translation: giấy khai sinh (birth certificates), marriage certificates, lý lịch tư pháp (police clearance), and hộ khẩu household registration books, which Vietnam retired domestically in 2023 but consulates and credential evaluators still ask about. Official Vietnamese documents share a recognizable format — the national header (CỘNG HÒA XÃ HỘI CHỦ NGHĨA VIỆT NAM / Độc lập – Tự do – Hạnh phúc), red seals, and dense boilerplate — and a fast readable translation tells you exactly what a form says before you decide what needs certifying.

Manufacturing, sourcing, and trade

Vietnam is now a top-ten US trading partner and a first stop for companies diversifying supply chains out of China, which means English speakers are reading more Vietnamese paperwork than ever: business licenses (giấy phép kinh doanh), factory audit reports, labor contracts, customs declarations, and quality certificates. Filings with Vietnamese authorities must be in Vietnamese, so cross-border deals routinely run on bilingual contracts — and the Vietnamese version is often the one that legally controls. Translating the Vietnamese side yourself, instead of trusting that the two columns say the same thing, is basic due diligence. The same applies in reverse: suppliers and staff in Vietnam translate English specifications, POs, and compliance documents daily.

Property, inheritance, and money back home

Overseas Vietnamese families deal with paperwork rooted in Vietnam for decades after emigrating: sổ đỏ and sổ hồng land-use and housing certificates, inheritance documents, powers of attorney, and notarized (công chứng) papers for property transactions that must be handled from abroad. These documents are written in formal legal Vietnamese, heavy with Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary that everyday conversational fluency — the kind second-generation speakers often have — doesn't cover. A clear English translation lets the whole family understand what a land certificate or a will actually says before anyone signs or ships originals overseas.

Study, credentials, and older records

Vietnam sends one of the world's largest cohorts of international students to the US, Australia, Japan, and Korea, and every application means translating học bạ school records, bảng điểm transcripts, and bằng tốt nghiệp diplomas — while families back home translate offer letters and financial documents the other way. Further back, records get harder: pre-1975 documents from the Republic of Vietnam use older Southern administrative vocabulary, French-era papers mix in French, and family genealogy books (gia phả) or temple records are often in chữ Nôm — character script that needs specialist handling, not standard Vietnamese translation. For printed 20th-century quốc ngữ documents, though, a photographed page works fine.

What to watch for in Vietnamese document translation

Most Vietnamese document translation failures trace back to a few repeatable traps. Diacritics are the big one: six tones and stacked vowel marks mean a dropped or misread mark changes the word, not just the spelling — ma, má, mà, mả, mã, and mạ are six different words — and the damage compounds in names, where diacritic-stripped English records collapse distinct Vietnamese names into one. Legacy encodings are the silent one: text copied from an old TCVN3 or VNI PDF is gibberish to a translation model unless the file is re-read as an image first. Pronouns are where machine output most obviously sounds wrong: Vietnamese has no neutral "you" or "I," so a translator must commit to a register — tôi and ông/bà or quý khách for formal documents — and cheap systems drift between kinship terms mid-page, which reads as unserious in a legal text. Formal Vietnamese runs on Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary that literal systems fragment instead of mapping to real legal English, and because spaces separate syllables rather than words, weak models mis-group compounds entirely. Finally, the conventions: dates are DD/MM/YYYY, the traditional decimal separator is a comma (1.234.567,89 in a Vietnamese invoice is 1,234,567.89 in English), and names run family-name first — Nguyễn Văn An is Mr. Nguyễn, not Mr. An, and roughly forty percent of the country shares that surname. A translation that gets the words right but the numbers, dates, or names wrong is still a wrong translation, which is the case for a quality tier that actually understands the document.

Vietnamese document translation FAQ

Is it free to translate a PDF from English to Vietnamese?: Free daily credits let you try document translation without an account. The uploader shows the credit cost before you translate. The upload limits without an account and on Free or Pro are 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar allows 50MB and 1,000,000 characters. A file within those limits may still need more credits than your free balance. Pro and Scholar include monthly credits, and credit packs are also available.
Can it read scanned or photographed Vietnamese documents?: Yes. Upload a photo or scan (JPG, PNG, or HEIC) or a scanned PDF and we run text recognition before translating. Vietnamese is a demanding OCR target — tone marks stack on top of vowel marks, and a smudge can turn ơ into o or one tone into another — so scan quality matters more than it does for English. Straight-on, well-lit photos of printed documents work well, including pages with the red official seals that overlap text on Vietnamese paperwork. Faint dot-matrix printing on older certificates and handwriting are the hard cases: expect a usable draft, and check names and numbers against the original.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Fast is built for volume and gist — skimming a report or working through a stack of records. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the right choice for anything you will act on: it keeps the pronoun and address system consistent (Vietnamese has no neutral "you" — a document that switches between ông, bà, anh, and em reads as broken), renders formal Sino-Vietnamese legal vocabulary as real legal English instead of literal fragments, and preserves tone-mark distinctions that separate one word from another. For contracts, certificates, and anything legal, use Advanced.
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. The credit cost is shown before you translate. Right-to-left, vertical and complex scripts are handled in the formatted output.
Can I use this for USCIS, a consulate, or Vietnamese authorities?: Not directly. US agencies like USCIS require a translation with a signed certification of accuracy, and Vietnamese authorities generally require notarized translations (công chứng bản dịch) done through a justice office or authorized translation provider in Vietnam. Use Polytranslator to understand your documents, prepare drafts, and work out which pages actually need official treatment — then pay for certification only where it's required. That is usually far cheaper than certifying an entire folder blind.
Which Vietnamese do I get — Northern or Southern?: Standard written Vietnamese, which is shared across the country and understood everywhere: the North–South split is mostly pronunciation plus everyday vocabulary (lợn/heo for pig, ô/dù for umbrella, bố/ba for dad), and formal documents largely avoid those words anyway. One nuance matters for diaspora families: overseas communities formed largely from the pre-1975 South and some prefer older Southern usage (ghi danh rather than đăng ký for "register," for example), while documents from Vietnam today use current official vocabulary. Translations here follow the modern standard; if the output is going to an older Southern-diaspora audience, a quick vocabulary pass is worth it.
What file types can I upload?: PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX (PowerPoint), XLSX (Excel), and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned documents as JPG, PNG, or HEIC. The translated file retains the workbook or presentation structure. One Vietnamese-specific tip: PDFs created in Vietnam before the mid-2000s often use pre-Unicode fonts (TCVN3, VNI) whose text extracts as gibberish — if a file looks garbled when you copy from it, upload it as a scan or photo instead and let text recognition read the page image. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters. Translation is limited by your credit balance.

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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