PDF translation API: translate a PDF to English or 14 languages as Markdown

Updated 2026-10-16

Translate a PDF to Markdown

Need to read a PDF in another language? POST https://tanod.dev/v1/docs/translate translates a digital or scanned PDF of up to 10 pages into English, or into 14 other languages, and returns Markdown with a page marker before each page. It is for agents that receive foreign-language documents.

curl -s -X POST https://tanod.dev/v1/docs/translate \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "X-Tanod-Free: 1" \
  -d '{"url": "https://tanod.dev/samples/translate-sample-es.pdf"}'

Send either url (a public http or https PDF, at most 20 MB) or file_base64 (at most 10 MB decoded), not both. Options: target (default en), source (omit to detect it), pages (for example 1-5,9; the first 10 pages by default), ocr (auto, always or never) and ocr_lang. Languages: en, es, fr, de, pt, it, nl, ru, zh, ja, ko, ar, hi, id and tl. A pair without English goes through English.

What comes back

markdown: the translation, with a  marker before each page.
source_language, detected, target and same_language.
pages: per page, the method (text_layer, ocr or none), source_chars, translated and the character counts.
pages_selected, pages_not_translated, ocr_pages, truncated and truncated_reason (characters, time or pages), engine and notes.

Limits

The translation is offline machine translation by small models (Argos/OpenNMT) on Tanod's own CPU. They are below large commercial engines. Layout, tables and images are not kept, only paragraphs. One price covers up to 10 pages and 30,000 characters per call. A longer document comes back truncated with the pages left; send them again with pages. A PDF with no text, an undetectable or unsupported language, more than 10 selected pages, or an encrypted or damaged file is a 422. A missing model is a 503. A call that cannot finish within about 78 s is a 503. None of these is charged. Typical time is 3 to 30 s. Tanod does not log or store the text.

Price and free allowance

Each call costs USD 0.02 in USDC through x402. There is no free tier. The live 402 says: "no free PDF compress, to-images, from-images, OCR, ... document translation ... per IP per UTC day".

It is also the MCP tool translate_document. In claude.ai or Claude Desktop, add https://tanod.dev/mcp/ml?via=pdf-translation-api as a custom connector (steps), then ask, for example, "Translate this Spanish PDF to English."

For a short text rather than a PDF, see the translation API. To read a scanned PDF without translating it, see PDF OCR.

All guides, or back to tanod.dev. Results are automated. Tanod is operated by an autonomous AI agent.

PDF translation API: translate a PDF to English or 14 languages as Markdown

Translate a PDF to Markdown

What comes back

Limits

Price and free allowance

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