Translate PDF to Corsican
Convert a PDF into Corsican, the Romance language of Corsica, keeping the grave accents, the chj and ghj spellings and the elision apostrophes that identify it. Files up to 1 GB.
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The marks that make Corsican look like Corsican
Grave accents on stressed vowels
Corsican writes à, è, ì, ò and ù to show where the stress falls, and it does so far more often than Italian does. Any font missing those five characters, or any export route that strips them, changes how the word is read aloud and makes the text look like sloppy Italian instead of correct Corsican.
The chj and ghj spellings
These clusters write palatal consonants that Italian does not have and are one of the surest visual signals that a page is in Corsican rather than in Tuscan. They are ordinary Latin letters, so nothing breaks in rendering, but a translation engine that quietly substitutes the nearest Italian spelling erases them and takes the Corsican character of the text with them.
Constant elision, constant apostrophes
Articles and prepositions elide before vowels, so apostrophes appear several times in an average sentence. Word processors convert the straight typewriter apostrophe into a curly quotation mark automatically, which leaves a document whose apostrophes are inconsistent and whose full-text search no longer matches its own words. Check them in the finished file.
No single official spelling
Corsican is described by its own linguists as polynomic: instead of one standard driving out the regional forms, several written norms are accepted as equally legitimate. There is therefore no dictionary you can point at to declare a variant wrong, and a reviewer from Bastia may correct a text that a reviewer from Sartène would have left alone.
Why machine output keeps sliding into Italian
Corsican sits in the Italo-Romance group and is closest to the Tuscan varieties spoken across the strait. The family resemblance is not a rumour: an Italian speaker can follow a good deal of written Corsican on first sight. That closeness is exactly what makes automated translation risky. Models see vastly more Italian than Corsican during training, and when they are unsure the safest guess is the Italian word. The output then reads fluently, passes a spellcheck, and is not Corsican. Watch the endings and the articles, which are where the two separate most reliably: Corsican prefers a final u where Italian has a final o, and its definite articles are much shorter than the Italian ones.
The island's paper trail explains part of the confusion. Corsica was governed from Genoa until 1768 and passed to France the following year, so administrative and notarial records from before that point are written in Italian or Latin, not French and not Corsican. Everything produced since is in French, which has been the sole language of the Republic's administration throughout. Corsican itself was overwhelmingly a spoken language until a written revival gathered pace in the twentieth century. The practical consequence is that a genealogist working on a Corsican family is usually translating Italian parish registers and French civil records, and only rarely a document actually written in Corsican.
Roughly 150,000 people use the language today, and UNESCO classes it as endangered. It is taught in schools on the island and appears on bilingual road signs, in the regional assembly's publications, in songwriting and in a substantial modern literature. Attempts to give it co-official status alongside French have been blocked in the French courts, so its presence in official documents is a matter of policy choice rather than legal requirement. Corsican also has close relatives across the water: the Gallurese and Sassarese varieties of northern Sardinia grew out of the same stock and remain broadly intelligible to Corsican speakers.
Corsican document translation pricing
Test a page or two on the trial before you commit a longer text.
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From upload to a Corsican PDF
Set up an account
Create a login with your email to open the translation dashboard.
Send the file over
Drag the PDF in or browse for it. Files of up to 1 GB are accepted on the paid plans, which covers full books and archive scans.
Choose Corsican as the output
Set the source language first. If your original is a French administrative document or an Italian parish record, say so rather than letting the source be guessed.
Read the result for Italian creep
Download the PDF and scan the articles, the word endings and the chj and ghj spellings. Those three things will tell you within a paragraph whether the output stayed in Corsican.
Deciding which Corsican your readers use
Because no single norm has been imposed, the first editorial decision is geographic. The island divides roughly into a northern and a southern zone, and the two differ in pronunciation, in some endings and in a slice of everyday vocabulary. Neither is more correct than the other, and a translation aimed at the wrong half of the island will read as slightly foreign rather than as wrong.
The northern zone
Bastia, Corte, the Cap Corse and the Balagne. This is the variety closest to Tuscan, the one most often heard in broadcast media and the one most learners meet first. Material aimed at a general island-wide audience tends to be written here by default.
The southern zone
Sartène, Porto-Vecchio and the Alta Rocca. This variety shades towards the Gallurese speech of northern Sardinia and keeps features the north has lost. Community publications and local cultural material from the south are frequently written in it deliberately.
Place names carry the same choice. Many towns have a Corsican name and a French one, and current signage often shows both, so a document may need Portivechju, Porto-Vecchio, or the pair. Fix a convention at the start and apply it consistently through the file rather than letting each mention be decided separately.
Material that gets translated into and out of Corsican
- Regional government publications, cultural programmes and public information issued bilingually with French
- Teaching material for the island's schools, where the language is offered as a subject, along with children's books and readers
- Museum labels, heritage trail panels, festival programmes and tourism copy for visitors to the island's towns and interior
- Song lyrics and liner notes from the polyphonic singing tradition, which is one of the language's most visible modern uses
- Genealogical records for descendants of the nineteenth-century emigration to mainland France, the Caribbean and South America
- Poetry, fiction and essays from the modern literary revival, along with academic writing about them
- Association statutes, local newsletters and village association paperwork
French remains the language of anything official on Corsica. For a birth certificate, a notarial deed or a court filing, the document you need translated is the French one, and if it is going to a foreign authority it will need a human translator's signed certification. See how to get an official translation for what that involves.
Corsican translation questions
Is Corsican just a dialect of Italian?
It is classified as its own language within the Italo-Romance group, closely related to Tuscan and to the Gallurese and Sassarese varieties of northern Sardinia. Speakers of Italian understand a lot of it, which is why the dialect label sticks, but the pronunciation, the articles, the word endings and a large body of vocabulary differ, and it has its own literature, teaching materials and orthographic conventions.
How do I check that the output is Corsican and not Italian?
Look at three things. Corsican definite articles are short, typically a single letter plus a vowel where Italian has longer forms. Corsican prefers a final u where Italian ends a word in o. And the chj and ghj spellings have no Italian equivalent, so a text that never contains them is worth a second look. Any Corsican speaker can confirm in a paragraph.
Which variety of Corsican will I get, northern or southern?
Automated output will lean towards the northern varieties, since those dominate published material and therefore training data. Corsican deliberately has no single imposed standard, so if your readers are in the south of the island it is worth having a local reviewer adjust the text rather than assuming one version fits everyone.
My family records from Corsica are not in Corsican. Why?
Corsica was under Genoese rule until 1768 and became French the year after, so parish and notarial records from before that period are usually in Italian or Latin, and everything from the French period onwards is in French. Corsican was mainly spoken rather than written until the twentieth-century revival. For genealogy you will most often be translating Italian or French sources rather than Corsican ones.
Will the accented letters and apostrophes come through the PDF intact?
The accented vowels are standard Latin-1 characters and render in any normal font. The one to watch is the apostrophe, which appears constantly because of elision and which editing tools like to convert between straight and curly forms. Open the finished file and confirm a single consistent apostrophe character was used, especially if the PDF will be indexed or searched.
Can I translate a bilingual French and Corsican document?
You can upload it, but a page that already carries two languages side by side is harder than a monolingual one, because the engine has to decide which blocks to touch. Where possible, feed in the single-language source and let the layout hold the two columns, rather than asking for a translation of an already-bilingual page.
How much text can I put through, and what does it cost?
The $2 7-day trial covers 10 pages or 3,000 words. Beyond that the Monthly plan is $14.99 for 100 pages or 30,000 words, and the Annual plan is $135 a year, roughly $11.25 a month. AI translation is charged at $0.005 per word, and paid plans take files up to 1 GB or 5,000 pages.
Translate a document into Corsican
Upload your PDF and get a Corsican version with the layout, images and tables where they were, and the accents and apostrophes carried through cleanly. Files up to 1 GB.
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