English to Hindi Translation

About the Hindi Language

Hindi is one of the two official languages of the Government of India and the most widely spoken language of northern India, with roughly 600 million total speakers worldwide when second-language speakers are included. It serves as a lingua franca across much of the country and reaches a global audience through Bollywood cinema and music.

Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language written in the Devanagari script, in which characters hang from a distinctive horizontal headline. It shares much of its everyday vocabulary and grammar with Urdu - the two are largely mutually intelligible in speech - while drawing its formal vocabulary from Sanskrit.

How Hindi Differs from English

Knowing these structural differences helps you write source text that translates well and spot problems in the output:

• Word order: Hindi uses Subject-Object-Verb order. "She reads a book" becomes literally "She book reads" (vah kitaab padhti hai).
• Grammatical gender: Every Hindi noun is masculine or feminine, and verbs and adjectives change to agree. "The book" (kitaab) is feminine, so a female or male subject reading it still uses a feminine-agreeing verb form for the object in some constructions.
• Postpositions: Hindi places relationship words after the noun: "on the table" becomes "table on" (mez par).
• Three levels of you: Hindi distinguishes tu (intimate), tum (familiar), and aap (respectful). Choosing the wrong one changes the tone of the whole sentence.
• Helper verbs: Tense is expressed with auxiliary verbs like hai, tha, and hoga placed at the end of the sentence.

Essential English to Hindi Phrases

These everyday phrases are a useful starting point. Use the Listen button on our translator to hear them spoken aloud:

Common Pitfalls When Translating English to Hindi

• Machine translators default to the respectful aap form. In messages to close friends or family, tum is often more natural - review the register before sending.
• Because every noun has a gender, a small change in the noun can force changes across the sentence. Check verb endings if you edit a translation by hand.
• Hindi mixes freely with English in everyday speech ("Hinglish"). A fully formal Hindi translation of a casual English message can sound unnaturally stiff.
• Some English words borrowed into Hindi have shifted meaning, so back-translation is a useful sanity check for important messages.

For a broader look at translation errors and how to avoid them, read our guide to 10 common translation mistakes.

How to Translate English to Hindi

1. Open the Translate All Words home page
2. Select English as the source language and Hindi as the target
3. Type or paste your English text and click Translate
4. Use the Listen button to hear the Hindi pronunciation, and Copy to save the result
5. For anything important, review the output against the tips above or ask a native speaker

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