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Translate a PDF without uploading it.
The PDFs people most need translated — contracts, medical records, immigration papers — are exactly the ones that should never be uploaded to a website. Traxlate translates them on your device instead. Here is how, and what the limits are.
Why “free online PDF translator” is a trade
An upload-based PDF translator has to receive your file to translate it. From that moment your contract exists on someone else’s server, governed by a privacy policy you probably didn’t read, retained for however long their policy says, wherever their servers are. For a recipe that is fine. For a medical record, an NDA-covered draft, or anything a client trusted you with, it can be a confidentiality breach you performed yourself, for free.
The fix is not a better policy. It is a translator that never receives the file in the first place.
How Traxlate does it
- Open /pdf and drop the file in. It is read by your browser, on your machine — there is no upload step to skip, because there is no upload step.
- Each page is handled on its own. Pages with embedded text are read directly; scanned pages are recognised with OCR, also on your device. A mixed document — typed pages with a scanned signature page — just works.
- Translation runs page by page and progress is saved as it goes. Close the tab, come back tomorrow: the job continues where it stopped instead of starting over.
The first time, you’ll install a language pack — about 2 GB, once, and the reason all of this can run locally. After that it works offline, and document translation is unmetered and free: it runs on your hardware, so we have nothing to charge you for. The guide covers what gets installed in detail.
The real limits
- 50 MB per file. Larger documents need splitting first; each part is remembered separately, so nothing is lost between them.
- Scanned pages depend on the scan. On-device OCR reads clean scans well; a crooked photocopy of a fax is hard for any OCR, local or not.
- Machine translation can be wrong in ways that read perfectly. Traxlate checks its own output before showing it and warns when unsure — but for a document where being wrong is expensive, have a professional linguist do it or review it. That upload is the explicit, labeled exception to everything on this page.
Beyond one PDF
The same on-device engine handles Word documents, subtitles and nine other formats on /documents, and plain text on /translate. If you are comparing this to a cloud service like DeepL, read the honest comparison; if you need the whole product to work with no connection at all, see what “offline” really means here. Translation is free — pricing only exists for sync and the local API.