AI Text Translator

The formality setting is the reason to use this

It is the one thing here that ordinary translation does not give you, and in several languages it is not a nicety but a grammatical requirement.

In German, addressing someone as du rather than Sie changes the verb and signals a relationship you may not have. In French it is tu and vous; in Spanish, tú and usted. In Japanese the politeness level runs all the way through the sentence — plain, polite and humble forms are different grammar, not different word choices. Korean has speech levels that work the same way. Hindi and Urdu distinguish tum and aap.

A general translator has to guess, and it usually guesses the middle. That produces a sentence which is grammatically correct and socially wrong — too familiar for a client email, or stiff and cold in a message to a friend. Neither reads as a translation error to you, and both are immediately obvious to a native speaker.

So set it deliberately: Formal for anything work-related, a first contact, a customer, an official body, or someone older or more senior. Informal for friends, family, a casual message, or a brand voice that is meant to be warm. Auto when you genuinely do not know and the text gives enough context to judge from.

If the message matters, formal is the safer error. Being slightly too polite reads as respectful; being too familiar reads as presumptuous.

Keep the text short, and check it came back whole

The most important practical limitation on this page, and the one with a real consequence.

There is a ceiling on how much can be produced in one response. A long passage can come back cut off — and unlike a truncated article, you may not notice, because if you could read the target language fluently you would not be translating into it.

Two habits make this a non-issue:

Translate in sections. A few paragraphs at a time rather than a whole document. It is more accurate as well as safer, because the model keeps better track of a shorter passage.

Check the ending. Compare the last sentence of your original with the last sentence of the translation — do the names, numbers and punctuation line up? Does it end where yours ends? That takes five seconds and catches the problem completely, even in a language you cannot read.

For a genuinely long document, this is the wrong shape of tool. A document translator that handles whole files will serve you better.

When Google Translate is the better choice

Being straight about this, because most translation needs are not this tool's job.

Use Google Translate or DeepL for: looking up a word or a phrase · understanding something written to you, where you need the gist fast · translating a whole web page · anything on your phone in the moment · camera and voice translation · long documents · rarer language pairs, where the dedicated engines have far more training behind them.

They are faster, they have no length limits that matter, and for pure comprehension they are excellent.

This is better when the output will be read by someone whose opinion of you matters — and the reason is precisely the formality control plus the fact that a language model works from meaning and context rather than phrase statistics. That helps with idioms, with tone, and with sentences whose meaning depends on the situation rather than the words.

So: an email to a client in another country, a message to a colleague or a host family, a short piece of marketing copy, a note that should sound warm rather than machine-made. Those are worth doing here.

What no translator can do for you

One honest caution, which applies to every tool of this kind including the paid ones.

Do not send an important translation you cannot read without having someone check it. Machine translation is now very good and it still fails in ways that are invisible from your side: a word with two meanings taken the wrong way, an idiom rendered literally, a name treated as a noun, a negation dropped, a technical term translated into the everyday word instead of the industry one.

Anything legal, medical, contractual or safety-related needs a professional. For everyday business correspondence, a quick read by a colleague who speaks the language costs a minute and catches the embarrassing failures.

A useful self-check when nobody is available: translate the result back into your own language with a different tool. It will not prove correctness, but it reliably exposes the sentences that have gone badly wrong.

The other settings, and getting better results

Preserve Formatting keeps your line breaks and structure rather than returning one flowing block. Turn it on for a list, an address, a set of bullet points, a poem, an email with paragraphs, or anything where the layout carries meaning.

Give it clean input. Translation quality depends heavily on the source. Complete sentences with proper punctuation translate far better than fragments and notes. If your original is scrappy, tidying it first improves the output more than any setting here.

Watch for words that should not be translated — product names, brand names, technical terms, job titles and user-interface labels. These are often translated when they should have been left alone. Check them in the output and put them back.

Unlike the file tools on this site, this one sends your text to a language model rather than running in your browser, so do not paste anything confidential. No account, and no limit beyond 30 translations an hour.

Related tools

Paraphraser rewrites within one language, which is sometimes what you actually need. Sentence Rewriter gives several versions of a single sentence, useful for getting an awkward translated line to read naturally. Grammar Fixer tidies English text before you translate it, which improves the result.