Translate PDF to Frisian
Get your PDF in West Frisian, the language of the Dutch province of Fryslan and the nearest living relative of English, with the circumflex vowels and page layout intact. Files up to 1 GB.
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There are three Frisian languages. Check which one you need
Frisian is not one language with regional accents. It is a small branch of West Germanic containing three languages that are not mutually intelligible, spread across two countries. Almost every request that reaches a translation service means the first of them, but it is worth ruling out the other two before you upload a file.
West Frisian
Around 470,000 speakers in the Dutch province of Fryslân, where it is an official language alongside Dutch. It has a standard spelling, school textbooks, newspapers, an academy that maintains the norm and a functioning publishing scene. This is what a Frisian language option means in practice.
North Frisian
Spoken on the German North Sea coast in Schleswig and on the islands of Föhr, Amrum and Sylt, by roughly ten thousand people. It is split into several strongly divergent dialects with their own spellings, and material in it is usually handled by specialists rather than by any general translation tool.
Saterland Frisian
The last surviving trace of East Frisian, kept alive by a few thousand people in a handful of villages in Lower Saxony. It is the smallest of the three and the most endangered. Documents in it are rare and it is not covered by mainstream machine translation.
Close to English, surrounded by Dutch
Frisian is the closest living relative of English. The two descend from neighbouring dialects on the North Sea coast and still share the sound changes that separate them from German and Dutch, which is why the Frisian words for cheese, key and day look and sound so familiar to an English speaker. A well known island sentence about butter, bread and green cheese has been used for centuries as a shibboleth precisely because the vocabulary lines up with English while the pronunciation gives outsiders away. None of that makes translation easier, but it does mean English is a more natural pivot for Frisian than it is for most minority languages of Europe.
The written form uses the Latin alphabet with a set of diacritics that Dutch does not have. Long vowels take a circumflex, giving â, ê, ô and û, and the acute appears on é and ú. Frisian writes y where Dutch writes ij, so a document full of ij is almost certainly Dutch that has been left untranslated. Vowel digraphs such as ea, oa, ie and ue do heavy work. Apostrophes turn up in the short clitic forms and in the relative particle attached to question words, so as with any language that leans on apostrophes it is worth checking that the finished file uses a single consistent character rather than a mixture of straight and curly marks.
One feature has no English or Dutch parallel and catches naive systems out. Frisian has a process, usually called breaking, in which a long vowel in a stem turns into a diphthong once a syllable is added, so the plural or the diminutive of a noun does not simply take an ending: the vowel inside the word changes as well. A system that treats the singular as a stem and glues a suffix onto it produces forms that do not exist. Word order is another divergence. Frisian is a verb-second language with subordinate clauses that send the verb to the end, which means an English sentence has to be structurally rebuilt rather than mapped across.
The practical risk with automated Frisian is drift into Dutch. Every Frisian speaker is bilingual, the two languages sit side by side in the same province, and Dutch is enormously better represented in training data. Output that is Dutch with a few Frisian words scattered through it looks plausible until a Frisian reader sees it. The spelling was revised in the 2010s by the Fryske Akademy, the province's language institute, so a text may also be correct but follow the older conventions, which is a separate question from being wrong.
Frisian PDF translation pricing
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Turning a PDF into Frisian
Register
Create an account with your email and open the dashboard.
Upload the document
Drag the PDF into the upload area or browse for it. Paid plans handle files up to 1 GB, which is enough for a full book or an archive scan.
Pick Frisian as the target
Set the source language, then choose Frisian. If your source is Dutch rather than English, say so, because Dutch and Frisian sources produce noticeably different drafts.
Download and check for Dutch
Open the result and look for stray ij spellings and Dutch function words. Those are the quickest indication that the engine slipped into the neighbouring language partway through.
Where a Frisian translation is actually wanted
Fryslân is bilingual by law. Dutch legislation gives the language a defined place in provincial administration, in the courts and in schools, where it is a compulsory subject, and the province publishes a great deal of its own material in both languages. That produces a steady stream of translation work that has nothing to do with immigration paperwork:
- Provincial and municipal publications, policy documents, public consultations and council material issued in both Frisian and Dutch
- School textbooks, classroom material and children's books for the compulsory Frisian lessons in the province's primary schools
- Literature, poetry and theatre texts, along with the academic and critical writing around a literary tradition that goes back centuries
- Museum panels, heritage signage and tourism material for visitors to Leeuwarden, the lakes and the Wadden Sea islands
- Genealogical research for descendants of the nineteenth-century emigration to the American Midwest, where Frisian settlers left records and place names behind
- Pedigree and studbook paperwork for the Friesian horse, whose registry is run from the province and whose documentation circulates worldwide
- Agricultural and dairy sector documents, cooperative statutes and land use material
- Church services, hymn texts and congregational material, including a full Frisian Bible translation
Dutch civil status records, diplomas and court papers are issued in Dutch, so a document destined for a foreign authority is normally a Dutch to English job rather than a Frisian one, and it will need a signed accuracy statement from a human translator. Our certified translation page covers what that has to say.
Place names need a decision
Most towns in the province have a Frisian name and a Dutch one, and over the past few decades many municipalities have made the Frisian form the official one. The province itself is officially Fryslân rather than Friesland. Its capital appears as Leeuwarden on Dutch signage and as Ljouwert on Frisian signage, and both forms are current.
For a translated document that means fixing a rule before you start. Addresses on legal or postal material usually keep the form printed on the original. Running text aimed at Frisian readers normally uses the Frisian names. Mixing the two conventions inside one file is the failure mode to avoid, especially in a document with an index, a map or a table of locations where the same place then appears twice under different spellings.
Frisian translation questions
Which Frisian will I get if I choose Frisian?
West Frisian, the language of the Dutch province of Fryslân. It is the only one of the three Frisian languages with a standard orthography, a body of published material and enough digital text behind it for automated translation to work. North Frisian, spoken on the German coast, and Saterland Frisian, spoken in Lower Saxony, are separate languages and need a specialist.
Is Frisian really the closest language to English?
Among living languages, yes. English and Frisian developed from neighbouring North Sea Germanic dialects and share sound changes that set them apart from Dutch and German, which is why a string of Frisian everyday words is recognisable to an English speaker on sight. The grammar has since diverged a long way, so the resemblance helps with vocabulary rather than with sentence structure.
How do I know the output is not just Dutch?
Look for the digraph ij. Frisian writes y where Dutch writes ij, so a page full of ij spellings is a strong sign the text drifted into Dutch. Also check for the circumflex vowels â, ê, ô and û, which Dutch does not use at all. If those are entirely absent from a long document, ask a Frisian speaker to look at it.
Do the circumflex and acute letters survive in the PDF?
They do. Every diacritic Frisian uses is part of the standard Latin-1 range and is present in the fonts a PDF rebuild falls back to, so there is no risk of blank boxes as there would be with a non-Latin script. The characters worth checking in the output are the apostrophes, which editing software likes to switch between straight and curly forms.
Can I translate old Frisian documents or Old Frisian law texts?
Medieval Frisian legal manuscripts are a scholarly field of their own and are not what a modern translation engine handles. The same applies to nineteenth-century handwritten records. Printed twentieth-century Frisian works reasonably well if the scan is clean. For older material, expect to use the output as a rough guide and to have a specialist verify it.
Should my source be English or Dutch?
Both are supported and both are used in practice. Dutch is the language most Frisian material is drafted alongside, so a Dutch source often gives a more idiomatic Frisian result for administrative text. English works well for general content. What matters most is telling the system which one you are giving it rather than leaving the source to be inferred.
How large a file can I put through and what does it cost?
Monthly and Annual plans accept up to 1 GB or 5,000 pages. The Monthly plan is $14.99 for 100 pages or 30,000 words and the Annual plan is $135 a year, about $11.25 a month. AI translation is $0.005 per word. The $2 7-day trial covers 10 pages or 3,000 words, which is enough to see how your layout survives.
Is a Frisian translation valid for official use in the Netherlands?
Frisian has a legally defined place in provincial government and in the courts of Fryslân, but that is about which language may be used, not about who may translate. Anything filed with an authority needs a translation certified by a qualified human translator. Use the AI output for reading, drafting and internal circulation.
Put your PDF into Frisian
Upload a file and download a West Frisian version with the original tables, images and page structure preserved and the circumflex vowels rendered correctly. Files up to 1 GB.
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