Translate English to Punjabi: dictate or type English, press Translate, and Punjabi in Gurmukhi script lands below to copy or save.
Dictate it or type it? How to choose
Speaking wins when the sentence is still in your head. Press the mic, say one phrase, and watch it land as editable English, no keyboard, no app-switching. Typing wins when the English already exists: an email, a caption, a note someone sent you. Click the box, paste, done. An English to Punjabi translation is only as good as the English you feed it, so whichever door you take, read the transcript once before you press Translate. A misheard word in English becomes a confidently wrong word in Gurmukhi.
- Pick the mic
- Quick replies, greetings, anything short. You almost certainly talk faster than you type, and the phrase lands while the thought is still fresh.
- Pick the keyboard
- Text that already exists, names that must be spelled exactly, or a room too loud for clean dictation. Paste it, tidy it, translate it.
- Flip the direction
- Need Punjabi to English instead? Swap the two language selectors, Punjabi as the speech language, English as the output, and the same page runs in reverse.
Still at the voice-memo stage, with no Punjabi needed yet? Dictate a clean English draft on the home page, then bring the text here once it reads right.
English to Punjabi translation: 10 phrases worth saving
These are the lines people actually send, greetings, courtesies, the questions you ask someone new. Dictate the English on the left and the panel should hand back the Gurmukhi shown beside it. Before a phrase enters this table, we dictate it into the tool ourselves and compare the output character by character, so every row here is checked rather than assumed. The third column is a rough Latin pronunciation, a reading aid, not a phonetics lesson, so say it and smile.
| English | Punjabi (Gurmukhi) | Pronunciation |
|---|
| Hello / Greetings | ਸਤਿ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਅਕਾਲ | sat srī akāl |
| Good morning | ਸ਼ੁਭ ਸਵੇਰ | shubh savēr |
| Welcome | ਜੀ ਆਇਆਂ ਨੂੰ | jī āiāṁ nūṁ |
| How are you? | ਤੁਸੀਂ ਕਿਵੇਂ ਹੋ? | tusīṁ kivēṁ ho? |
| What is your name? | ਤੁਹਾਡਾ ਨਾਮ ਕੀ ਹੈ? | tuhāḍā nām kī hai? |
| Yes / No | ਹਾਂ / ਨਹੀਂ | hāṁ / nahīṁ |
| Please | ਕਿਰਪਾ ਕਰਕੇ | kirpā karkē |
| Thank you | ਧੰਨਵਾਦ | dhanvād |
| Sorry | ਮਾਫ਼ ਕਰਨਾ | māf karnā |
| I love you | ਮੈਂ ਤੁਹਾਨੂੰ ਪਿਆਰ ਕਰਦਾ ਹਾਂ | maiṁ tuhānūṁ piār kardā hāṁ |
One grammar note the table hides: ਕਰਦਾ (kardā) in the last row is what a man says. A woman says ਕਰਦੀ (kardī), Punjabi has 2 grammatical genders, and this verb form carries the speaker's.
The science of translating English to Punjabi
A good English to Punjabi translation is not a word swap. A modern translator reads your whole English sentence, builds an internal picture of what it means, then writes that meaning out fresh in Gurmukhi. One half of the system, the encoder, turns the English into a string of numbers that captures each word in its context; the other half, the decoder, writes the Punjabi one word at a time, each step paying attention to the parts of the English that matter most for the word it is forming. That is why a phrase, never a lone word, is the smallest honest unit when you translate English to Punjabi.
Why word order makes it hard
English and Punjabi do not share a sentence shape. English puts the verb in the middle, in subject, verb, object order: "I drink tea." Punjabi puts the verb last, in subject, object, verb order: "maiṁ chāh pīndā hāṁ," literally "I tea drink." To translate English to Punjabi, a system cannot run left to right and hope for the best; it has to take the sentence whole and re-lay it in Punjabi order. Punjabi also joins words with postpositions, small markers that follow the noun where English sets a preposition in front of it, so the scaffolding of the sentence is rebuilt rather than copied.
What English leaves out: gender and respect
The deeper challenge is the information English simply does not carry. Punjabi verbs change with the speaker's gender: a man writes "kardā" where a woman writes "kardī" for the same English "do," yet the English gives no hint which to choose. English "you" hides a second decision the Punjabi must make out loud, the familiar ਤੂੰ (tū) for a friend or child and the respectful ਤੁਸੀਂ (tusīṁ) for an elder, a stranger, or a customer. Punjabi is tonal on top of that, carrying 3 tones that ride on the spelling itself rather than on any separate accent mark, so a translator settles them simply by choosing which letters to write. The system has to infer the gender and the politeness from context, and a wrong guess is the most common way an English to Punjabi translation reads slightly off, so it is the first thing worth checking by eye.
| Speaking to | Punjabi "you" | Tone it sets |
|---|
| A friend, a child, someone younger | ਤੂੰ (tū) | Familiar, casual |
| An elder, a stranger, a customer | ਤੁਸੀਂ (tusīṁ) | Respectful, polite |
Add the honorific "ji" after a name or a yes and the respect rises again; when you are unsure, ਤੁਸੀਂ is the safe default.
Names, rare words, and how quality is scored
Names and brands are not translated at all, they are transliterated, respelt in Gurmukhi by sound, so "Singh" becomes ਸਿੰਘ and "London" becomes ਲੰਡਨ. Because there is far less English and Punjabi example text for a model to learn from than for a language like French, rare words, names, and numbers are where any English to Punjabi translation is weakest, which is exactly what we see in testing: everyday sentences come back clean and the slips cluster on proper nouns and digits.
The field even has a yardstick for this, the BLEU score, which checks a machine's Punjabi against a human translation and rates the overlap from 0 to 100: under 15 is unusable, over 30 is clearly understandable, and over 50 reads fluently. No single number is the last word, since one correct sentence can still score low, which is why a quick read by a person stays part of how you translate English to Punjabi well.
Gurmukhi or Shahmukhi: which one is your output?
Punjabi lives in 2 scripts, and the split is geographic. In India it is written in Gurmukhi, left to right; in Pakistan it is written in Shahmukhi, a Perso-Arabic script that runs right to left. The numbers behind that split are big: roughly 150 million native speakers in total, with 88.9 million in Pakistan according to the 2023 census there and 31.1 million in India per the 2011 one. Two readerships, two scripts, and a translation aimed at the wrong one misses its audience.
This page gives you the Indian side: when you translate English to Punjabi here, the output is always Gurmukhi. The script is an abugida of 35 original letters, Punjabi children learn it as paintī, "the thirty-five", plus 6 added consonants and 9 vowel signs that hang above, below, or beside the letter they modify. In Unicode it occupies the Gurmukhi block, U+0A00 to U+0A7F, 128 code points, the standard that lets the same text travel through chat apps, captions, and documents unchanged. The Punjabi you read back is the standard written form, the Majhi dialect that schoolbooks and newspapers use across central Punjab on both sides of the border, so it reads naturally to the widest audience rather than to one district.
If your reader is in Lahore rather than Ludhiana, be careful. There is no Shahmukhi option here, so treat the Gurmukhi as a working draft and have it transliterated before it ships. And whatever the script, give names and numbers one extra look, they are the first thing automatic translation gets wrong.
9 English to Punjabi questions, answered straight
Picking your input
Should I dictate or type my English?
Dictate when the sentence is still in your head and your hands are free; type or paste when the text already exists or the room is noisy. Both paths end at the same Gurmukhi panel, so pick whichever gets clean English in faster.
Is it really free, no account, no cap?
Yes. No payment, no sign-in, no daily limit, nothing to install. If you want to dictate you need a working microphone; typed or pasted English needs nothing beyond the browser you already have open.
What if my microphone will not start?
Type instead, the box takes typed or pasted English even with no working mic, so the translator never goes down with the hardware. To get dictation back, check the browser's microphone permission and close any other app holding the device.
Gurmukhi on your screen
Will it write Shahmukhi, the Punjabi script used in Pakistan?
No. Output here is Gurmukhi only. Shahmukhi, the Perso-Arabic script most Pakistani Punjabi readers use, is not offered on this page, so for a reader in Pakistani Punjab, treat the Gurmukhi as a draft and get it transliterated separately.
Why does the Punjabi render as empty boxes?
Hollow rectangles mean the device lacks a Gurmukhi font; the translation itself arrived intact. Switch on Punjabi language support in the system settings, or paste the text into an app with Indic fonts, and the same characters display correctly.
Punjabi is tonal, does the output mark the tones?
No, and that is correct behaviour. Punjabi distinguishes 3 tones, but Gurmukhi has no separate tone symbols; tone rides on the spelling itself, through letters that once stood for voiced aspirates. Write it as given and a Punjabi reader supplies the tones.
Privacy, connection, reverse gear
Can I go the other way, Punjabi to English?
Yes. Swap the two selectors, make Punjabi the speech language and English the output, and the page runs in reverse: dictate or type Punjabi, read English. It starts as English-in because that is what most visitors arrive needing.
Is my voice or text kept anywhere?
There is no file upload and no account or history on this page. Worth knowing: turning your voice into text uses the speech capability your browser ships with, and certain browsers carry that step out on the provider's own machines instead of locally. The page itself never holds on to or even sees that audio. When the tab closes the session is gone, so copy or download the Gurmukhi first, and give sensitive text the same caution you would give any online translator.
Will it run without an internet connection?
No. Producing the translation needs a connection while you work, so get online first. There is still nothing to download or set up, the page behaves like any ordinary website, on a phone or a computer.
