English to Tamil, and Tamil to English
Both directions work the same way. A Word file is edited where it stands: every paragraph style, table, list, header, footer and page setting stays the file’s own and only the words change, so a Tamil circular comes back as an English circular, and an English notice as a Tamil one, with its centred heading, numbered list and bordered table where they were. A PDF with selectable text is first turned into a Word file and then translated, so the result is a Word file you can edit, and how closely it follows the PDF is the PDF-to-Word conversion’s doing.
Translated Tamil is set in Noto Sans Tamil, as real Unicode text you can search and edit; if that font is not on your computer, choose any Tamil font in Word. Numbers, dates, section references, amounts, times of day, e-mail addresses and web addresses are taken out before a sentence is sent and put back afterwards, and an answer in which one does not come back exactly once is not accepted. A sentence that still cannot be translated stays in the source language and is highlighted yellow; it is never dropped, and never filled in with a guess.
What to read carefully in the Tamil
Tamil attaches its case endings to a word, and the translation attaches them to addresses too: help@example.gov.in-க்கு, https://www.example.gov.in/apply-ஐப். That is ordinary Tamil, and the address before the hyphen is unchanged, but someone copying the address must leave the ending off. Going the other way matters more: translated back into English, those endings were carried along as letters after the address, help@example.gov.in-க. When you translate a Tamil document into English, check every e-mail and web address for a stray ending.
The sentence order follows Tamil, so the Act’s name and the section can trade places. Names of acts, schemes and offices are translated like any other words and may not match the official Tamil name your department uses.
What was measured for Tamil
Before Tamil was switched on, the production pipeline translated the test notice from English into Tamil and back. In both directions 6 of 6 protected items came back exactly: the section reference, the year, the date, the amount, the e-mail address and the web address. The Tamil side was written in the Tamil script, and the English read back close to the original. A Word notice with a heading, a centred line with a bold date, a numbered list, a table, a tab, a header and a footer was also translated into Tamil and back, and its paragraph settings, table grid, page setup, header and footer were identical to the source, on the same number of pages.
That is a check of the machinery, not of the language. It says the tool kept your numbers and your layout; it does not say every sentence reads the way a Tamil writer would put it.
Tested on real Tamil documents
Besides the test notice, two real documents were translated on the live service during the quality checks of 22 and 23 October 2026: an English budget explainer, with figures in crore, ranges, acronyms and a screenshot, translated into Tamil, and a Tamil weather warning listing 27 districts, translated into English. Both finished with every export check passed and nothing left untranslated, and all 27 districts were in the English.
Before those fixes, the weather warning had a number doubled and the budget file had ranges written wrongly; both were found by reading the output and fixed in the pipeline. Two documents are a small sample, which is why this page lists what to read rather than promising it is right.
Tamil in a scan or an old font
A scanned PDF has no text to translate, so it is refused rather than guessed at. Read it first with Tamil OCR, correct what needs correcting, and translate the Word file that comes out. Tamil set in an old 8-bit font such as TSCII or Bamini pastes as Latin letters; convert it to Unicode with the legacy converter first, then translate the result.
Footnotes, endnotes and comments are not translated yet, and the result says so. Text inside a picture is not translated. Tamil OCR reads scans of printed Tamil, and its Word file can be translated straight away.