Type it, say it, photograph it, or drop in a PDF. Read the answer on the right, and switch between the version a textbook prints and the version you'll actually hear.
Strangers, officials, anyone older, anything written.
Translation appears here.
A translator gives you one version of a sentence. Indonesian usually has two, and picking the wrong one is how you end up sounding like a government form at a warung.
What the book says
Apakah Anda mau minum sesuatu?
Correct, and what most tools will hand you. Right for a stranger, an official, or anyone older than you.
What you'll hear
Mau minum?
Same question, between friends. Indonesian drops the parts everyone can infer, and the full version starts to sound stiff.
Neither is more correct than the other. Knowing which one to use is the part a translator can't do for you, and it's what the lessons are for.
Both versions are correct. The formal one is what a phrasebook prints. The everyday one is what comes back at you in a warung, a Grab or a group chat.
Thank you
FormalTerima kasih
EverydayMakasih
How much is it?
FormalBerapa harganya?
EverydayIni berapa?
I don't understand
FormalSaya tidak mengerti
EverydayNggak ngerti
Where is the toilet?
FormalDi mana toilet?
EverydayToiletnya di mana?
What is your name?
FormalSiapa nama Anda?
EverydayNamanya siapa?
I don't want it
FormalSaya tidak mau
EverydayNggak mau
Do you speak English?
FormalApakah Anda bisa berbahasa Inggris?
EverydayBisa bahasa Inggris?
Not spicy, please
FormalTidak pedas, ya
EverydayNggak pedes ya
It's very good
FormalEnak sekali
EverydayEnak banget
I'm just looking
FormalSaya hanya lihat-lihat
EverydayLihat-lihat aja
Sorry
FormalMohon maaf
EverydayMaaf
See you later
FormalSampai jumpa
EverydayKetemu lagi ya
Nggak is the spoken form of tidak. In messages you'll also see it writtengak and ngga, and all three are the same word.
A warung menu is the most useful thing you will photograph in Indonesia and the hardest to read automatically. Half of them are handwritten, half are laminated and reflecting the sky, and the recognition here runs on your own phone rather than on a server somewhere. It manages printed text held flat. It will not manage a chalkboard.
So here is the shortcut that works when the camera doesn't. Most of an Indonesian menu is two columns wide: something to eat, and what was done to it.
What it is
What was done to it
Take one from each side and you have read the line. Nasi goreng is fried rice.Ayam bakar is chicken grilled over fire. Mie rebus is boiled noodles. Fifteen words and you can put the phone away.
Rb is short for ribu, thousand. So 25rb is 25,000 rupiah, and a menu that just says Nasi Goreng 25 means exactly the same. Nobody writes the zeros, and no translator will explain this to you.
The one sentence worth having ready before you sit down, in both versions:
What the book saysTidak pedas, ya.
What you'll hearNggak pedes ya.
Note the vowel. It's pedas in writing and pedes in almost every mouth in Java, and the ya on the end is what turns an instruction into a request.
Not wrong as in ungrammatical. Wrong as in nobody talks like that.
Ask for Anda and you get Anda, which Indonesians almost never say to each other. In a shop or a warung, the move is to drop the pronoun entirely or use the person's title: Bapak mau ke mana? for 'where are you going, sir'.
Bapak, Ibu, Mas, MbakTidak negates verbs and adjectives, bukan negates nouns. Saya tidak makan 'I'm not eating'. Saya bukan turis 'I'm not a tourist'. Swap them and you sound like a badly dubbed film.
Tidak or bukan'Write' is tulis, menulis or menuliskan depending on the sentence. The affix system is the one part of Indonesian grammar that takes real work, and a translator hides it from you instead of teaching it.
Where the affixes startYa, sih, dong, kok, lah. They carry the tone of the sentence and they rarely survive a translation. Nggak pedes is an order. Nggak pedes ya is a request.
Ordering food without regretYes, and there is no account. Nothing you do here is stored. Photos and documents are read on your own device and never leave it. The text itself goes to a translation service to be translated, and dictation runs through your browser's speech recognition.
No. The text recognition runs inside your browser, which is why the first photo takes a few seconds to get going: it downloads a two megabyte reader once, then keeps it. The trade is honesty about quality. It handles a printed menu held flat and in focus. A handwritten board, a neon sign, or a photo taken at an angle will come back garbled, so the extracted text lands in the box on the left where you can fix it before translating.
Because this pulls the text out of the file and translates that. You get words, not a formatted copy of your document. Returning a translated file with its layout intact is a different and expensive service, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
You're on Firefox, which never shipped speech recognition. Chrome, Edge and Safari have it. On those, dictation is handled by the browser's own recognition service rather than by us.
Because Indonesian has two registers and they are not interchangeable. Formal is for strangers, officials, anyone older than you and anything written. Everyday is for friends, markets and messages. Picking the wrong one is the fastest way to be answered in English.
Close enough to read a menu, far enough to get you in trouble. The false friends are the problem: bisa is 'can' in Indonesian and 'poison' in Malay, budak is 'kid' in Malay and 'slave' in Indonesian. This translator does Indonesian.
No. A translator hands you a sentence, and you forget it by the next one. It is useful for the sentence you need right now, and for checking a word you half remember. The lessons are what make the next sentence unnecessary.
Your device has no Indonesian voice installed. The audio uses the voices already on your phone or computer, which is why it costs nothing and works offline. Adding an Indonesian voice in your system settings brings the button back.
Twenty-eight free lessons, from greetings to the pronouns that give you away. Both registers on every phrase, and the label that tells you which is which.
Start with the beginner course