DeepL vs Qaaf AI for Islamic Books: An Honest Comparison

Let us start with something most comparison articles will not tell you: DeepL is a very good translator. It supports Arabic, Urdu and Pashto, its output reads more naturally than most competitors, and for ordinary prose it is excellent. If you are translating a business letter from Arabic to English, use DeepL.

This article is about a narrower question. If you are a publisher, a madrasa, or a research institute with a 500-page Islamic book to translate, does a general-purpose translator do the job? Having translated full books for established Islamic publishers and research institutes, we have a clear view of where the line sits.

The one problem that decides everything

Islamic books are not written in one language. An Urdu commentary quotes the Quran in Arabic. A Fiqh text cites a Hadith in Arabic mid-sentence and then discusses it in Urdu. A footnote gives a reference in a third convention entirely.

A general-purpose translator sees all of that as one input in one language and translates all of it into your target language. That means the Quranic verse gets translated too — turned into English or Urdu prose, stripped of its Arabic, and reworded by a machine that has no idea it was scripture.

For most content, translating everything is exactly right. For a religious text it is the one thing you must not do. The ayah has to survive as the ayah.

Where DeepL genuinely wins

• Natural phrasing. For conversational and business text, DeepL's output often reads better than anything else available.
• European languages. Its coverage and quality across European pairs is excellent and not something we claim to match.
• Speed on short text. For a paragraph, it is instant and free.

If your work does not involve scripture, regional South Asian languages, or whole books, DeepL is a reasonable choice and we would rather you knew that.

Where it stops being the right tool

Regional languages

DeepL covers Arabic, Urdu and Pashto. It does not cover Sindhi, Saraiki, Balochi, Brahui, Hindko or Kashmiri. For a Pakistani publisher, those are not edge cases — they are the audience. A book that exists in Urdu but not Sindhi is a book that most of Sindh cannot read.

Scripture inside the text

This is the difference that matters. Qaaf AI is built to recognise Quranic verses and Hadith inside a mixed-language document and preserve them in Arabic with their diacritics, rather than translating them into the target language. References are kept as the author wrote them, not invented or corrected.

Whole books, not paragraphs

A 500-page book is a different problem from a page. Chapter headings need to stay headings. Tables need to stay tables. Poetry needs to keep its line breaks instead of being reflowed into prose. Running a book through a paragraph-shaped tool means someone spends days putting the structure back.

Cost and turnaround, with real numbers

This is where the comparison stops being about features. Here is what a 500-page Islamic book actually costs to translate, three ways:

Our actual throughput is 100 pages in 20 to 25 minutes, so a 500-page book lands in roughly two hours. The $20 is the whole book, not a per-page rate.

We are not claiming the output needs no scholarly review — anything going to print should be read by someone qualified. The claim is narrower and more useful: the review is a review, not a rescue.

What about old and damaged scans?

Most archive work is not clean PDFs. It is photocopies of photocopies, faded print, and books scanned two decades ago.

In practice the system handles badly faded scans well. Where it fails is the honest limit: if a human cannot read the page, neither can we. When text is barely legible we mark it rather than guess, because an invented word in a Fiqh text is far worse than a visible gap.

Which should you use?

Use DeepL if: you are translating ordinary prose, working in European languages, or handling short passages with no scripture in them.

Use Qaaf AI if: your documents contain Quranic or Hadith text, you need Sindhi, Saraiki, Balochi, Brahui, Kashmiri or Hindko, or you are working through whole books rather than pages.

Common questions

Does Qaaf AI translate the Quranic verses in my book?

No. Quranic text is preserved in Arabic with its diacritics. Only the author's own commentary around it is translated, which is what a printed translation does.

How long does a 500-page book take?

About two hours, based on a throughput of 100 pages every 20 to 25 minutes.

What does it cost?

$20 for a 500-page book. There is no per-seat licence and no subscription to maintain between projects.

Will it work on my old scanned books?

Usually, including quite faded ones. If a page is barely readable to the human eye it may fail, and we would rather tell you that than promise otherwise.

Do I still need a scholar to check the output?

For anything going to print, yes. No responsible answer to this question is no. The difference is how much work that review turns out to be.