How to Translate a PDF and Keep It Readable

Machine translation has quietly become excellent for everyday business documents. The remaining challenges are structural: keeping headings as headings, tables as tables, and specialist terms consistent from page one to page forty.

Decide what you need first

• Understanding. You need the gist of an incoming document. Speed matters, polish does not.
• Communication. You are sending this to someone else. It needs a human review pass.
• Legal or medical. Machine translation is a first draft only; a professional must sign it off.

Step-by-step: translating in Docsy

1. Open the Translate PDF tool.
2. Upload the document. If it is a scan, run OCR first so there is text to translate.
3. Choose the target language.
4. Run the translation and read it as the text arrives.
5. Copy or download the translated text.

Keeping quality high

• Translate section by section for long documents so terminology stays consistent and you can check as you go.
• Fix the glossary early. Decide how key terms should be rendered and keep them uniform throughout.
• Watch numbers and dates. Decimal separators and date order differ between locales — verify every figure.
• Leave names and product terms alone. Company names, trademarks and file names should not be translated.

Translating images and screenshots

Text inside an image has to be recognised before it can be translated. Extract the text with OCR first, review it — this is the step where mistakes creep in — and then translate the corrected text. Separating the two stages means an OCR error never silently becomes a translation error.

FAQ

Which languages are supported?

All widely used business languages are supported, with the strongest quality between major European and Asian language pairs.

Will the layout be preserved?

You receive translated text with its heading and paragraph structure. Rebuilding a pixel-identical layout requires placing the text back into a template.

Is machine translation good enough for contracts?

Use it to understand a document quickly. Anything legally binding should be reviewed by a qualified human translator.

Can I translate a scanned document?

Yes — recognise the text with OCR first, check the extraction, then translate.

Translate a document

Upload the file you cannot read and have it in your language in a moment.