Translate a PDF online

Yes — unlimited free use with a watermark and 0 AI Deep Detect, then $8.99/mo Start for 8 AI Deep Detect/mo. No credit card required for the free plan.

Yes — we host in Frankfurt (EU), AES-256 at rest. GDPR-compliant, never used to train third-party AI.

Four hard differences: (1) Pricing — DeepL Pro Advanced is $24.99/mo per seat with a 30-PDF/month cap on the Starter and a hard 5 MB per-file ceiling on the free web tool; Smallpdf gates the translator behind Pro at $9/mo (or $108/yr) after 2 free tasks/day; Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant is a $4.99/mo add-on stacked on top of $19.99/mo Acrobat Pro = $24.98/mo total for translation; Google Translate is free but caps at 10 MB and strips PDF formatting into a continuous HTML stream. iFillPDF gives you unlimited free use with a watermark and 0 AI Deep Detect with no card, then $8.99/mo Start for 8 AI Deep Detect/mo — translation included, no add-on. (2) Layout fidelity — DeepL preserves single-column body text well but collapses multi-column legal pleadings, IRS Form 5471 Schedule M tables and Companies House CS01 ownership grids; Google Translate strips layout entirely; Smallpdf re-flows around tables. iFillPDF rebuilds the PDF page-by-page using the original ISO 32000-1:2008 page tree, so a 4-column technical datasheet, an IRS Schedule C profit-and-loss table or a UK statutory account stays pixel-aligned. (3) OCR for scans — DeepL Pro requires the OCR-Pro tier ($30/mo) for scanned PDFs; iFillPDF OCRs Tesseract-grade in 80+ languages (including CJK, Arabic RTL, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Thai) at no extra cost on every plan. (4) Data residency — DeepL hosts in Germany (good), Smallpdf in Switzerland (outside EEA, no automatic GDPR adequacy), Adobe and Google in the US under Cloud Act 50 USC §3024 and FISA 702 reach. iFillPDF runs on Hetzner Falkenstein eu-central-1 with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, ICO UK registered, files purged within 24h and never used for AI training.

Short answer: yes for everyday business use, with two carve-outs you should know. Our translated PDF is a derivative document — it embeds the original source language metadata in the XMP block (ISO 16684-1) and a per-page provenance tag, so a reviewer can verify it against the source. For domestic IRS purposes the agency accepts English-translated supporting documents under IRM 4.10.7.2.7 provided the translator can attest accuracy; iFillPDF includes an automatic translator declaration in the file metadata. The two carve-outs: (a) Foreign tax credit substantiation under 26 USC § 901 and IRS Form 1118 may require a certified human translation if the source is in a non-treaty language and the credit exceeds $10,000 — pair our output with a sworn translator stamp for those filings. (b) HMRC self-assessment under the Companies Act 2006 §394 generally accepts machine-translated supporting docs for non-statutory items, but the audited statutory accounts themselves must be filed in English (Companies House) or Welsh — translate the source, then have a director sign the English version. For invoices, contracts under $250K, IRS Form 1042-S withholding statements, day-to-day cross-border supplier docs and Stripe Atlas Delaware LLC operating documents going to French/Spanish founders, the iFillPDF translation is sufficient on its own and matches the quality of DeepL Pro Advanced at zero additional cost for the first 3 pages each month.