PDF documents are designed to maintain their appearance across any platform. This design philosophy makes them great for sharing final reports and other important documents over email or the web. Unfortunately, PDF documents aren’t necessarily the most user-friendly format if you want to do something with them.
Editing a PDF is essentially impossible, without having to re-format the entire document. Simply copying large blocks, or all of the text from a PDF document can also be difficult. Extra spacing and newlines get added and not all of the content necessarily ends up in the right order. This can be especially frustrating if the PDF is in a foreign language and you need to translate it. Thankfully, there are some tools that can help out in these situations.
Google Translate
Google Translate has a document translation feature that accepts PDF documents alongside ten other file types. To translate a PDF document with Google Translate you first need to open https://translate.google.com, then click on “Documents” in the top-left corner, and then select which document to upload.
Once you’ve uploaded a document, click “Translate” in the bottom-right corner. Google will then try to translate the document. Each page will be translated individually, and Google will try to maintain the structure of the text on the page, although this may not be possible in all cases.
Microsoft Word
To translate a PDF document in Microsoft Word, you first need to import and convert the PDF document. To do so, press Ctrl + O, then select the PDF document and click “OK” on the warning about converting the PDF document.
To translate the imported and converted PDF, you need to open the translation toolbar. To do so, click on the “Review” tab in the top bar, then click on “Translate” and choose either “Translate Selection” or “Translate Document”.
Tip: It doesn’t matter which you pick yet, you can still change your mind as this only opens the toolbar.
The “Translate Document” option, translates the entire document and opens the translation in a new Word document. “Translate Selection” allows you to highlight specific sections of text from the document to see an instant translation. You can switch from one mode to the other by clicking “Selection” or “Document” at the top of the translation toolbar.
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