Translate your own document: an overview

What is this?

My materials is a private space for translating one of your own Christian documents: a Bible study, a lesson, a devotional, or other ministry material. You upload it, we tell you what is likely to be hard to translate, you decide what to change, and then it is translated and checked. You stay in control of every change to your wording.

Anyone with an account can use it. Open the account menu (your picture or initials at the top right, or the menu on a phone) and choose My materials, or find it at the top of the left menu inside Translation Studio. You do not need a workspace or a team.

It is separate from the team-based Translation Studio. Nothing you upload here is shared with anyone else, and only you can see your projects.

The journey in six steps

1. Sign in with an emailed code. No password to remember.
2. Upload your document and say which language and which audience you are translating for.
3. The document check. We read the first few pages to confirm this is the kind of material the service translates.
4. Review your readiness report. See the Scripture references, doctrine topics, acronyms and hard-to-translate wording we found, and accept, edit or keep each suggestion.
5. Approve your source text. This freezes the exact version that will be translated.
6. Translate and review the result. Each section is translated, translated back into English, and compared with your text. You clear anything that needs a look, approve, and download your translation and a report.

You can leave at any step and come back. Your project is saved, and the page shows what to do next.

What you need

• An email address you can open.
• A document as a Word (.docx), PDF, Markdown (.md) or text (.txt) file, up to 25 MB, with real, selectable text in it.
• The language and the locale you are translating for. A locale is a language plus a region, such as es-MX for Spanish in Mexico. The same language reads differently in different places.

What it can and cannot do today

It can analyze a document, suggest clearer English, translate it, check the meaning, and give you a Word or Markdown file.

It cannot yet:

• Read scanned pages with no selectable text.
• Produce PDF or HTML output. If you ask for one, you get a Word file and a note.
• Reproduce your original fonts, colours, spacing or page layout.
• Suggest additional Bible passages that teach a doctrine your document covers.
• Replace Scripture quotations with an approved Bible translation. See what to check before you publish.

Translation here is AI-assisted. Treat the result as a draft that a bilingual reader who knows your audience should review before you publish it. That is also what our Terms of use say about AI-generated content.