Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 November 17

= November 17 =

Foreign language translation
If I have a PDF document in a foreign language ... is there some (free, no-cost) way through "Google Translate" (or any other way) to translate the PDF file to English? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:32, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
 * How many pages? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:43, 17 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Maybe 2 pages. Or so.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 19:55, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
 * That's small enough you could try copying-and-pasting the text into Google Translate. Keeping in mind that there's no guarantee of a perfect translation, but it's worth a shot. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:29, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Oh, you can "copy and paste" from a PDF file? I never knew that.  Thanks.  I will try that.  Thank you.    Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 04:21, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Depends how the pdf was made in the first place. If it was just an optical scan then you can't copy-paste from it, but if it was generated from something like a Word document then you can. --Viennese Waltz 08:33, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
 * For clarity, if it's an optical scan then you can only copy if whoever made the PDF OCRed it before hand or otherwise put text in the background, and it might not be accurate.I mention this because quite a few PDFs are like this. Also some PDFs may be made as images rather than scans, in these cases although it was probably not that hard to add copyable text, often they probably don't since it may partially defeat the reason they are making it as an image. Also even for non scans, there's no guarantee you can copy and paste. PDFs have DRM which most readers will respect which can disallow copying (among other things). Some PDFs although they are not scans or images are made in weird ways, probably for DRM like reasons, where they do weird stuff like use custom fonts or even make vector images for the text so copying doesn't work properly. Nil Einne (talk) 10:07, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
 * As noted above, if it's text from a Word document or something, you should be able to copy-and-paste. If it's a picture, you would need to open a text file and start typing the words as best you can. I would just retype a couple of sentences and see if the results make any sense, before retyping the whole thing. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:12, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
 * There are freeware tools for OCRing a PDF. 93.136.31.83 (talk) 03:26, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

What language from and to and we may be able to help further. Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 10:47, 18 November 2019 (UTC)


 * From an original Italian document ... to English.  Thanks.    Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 20:56, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 01:12, 21 November 2019 (UTC)


 * I'm a linguist. There are a number of free translators on the web, not just Google. Although they're getting better, none even comes close to the accuracy and readability of a human translator. What you can get is the "jist" of it (professionals call this "jisting") - it will give you a sense of the topic and whether it's important enough to merit the much more expensive human attention. But be very cautious in quoting machine translations, sometimes they get the sense completely wrong. I can read Italian and would give it a quick glance if you want. deisenbe (talk) 15:35, 21 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the additional info ... and for the offer to help. I now have the document translated.  Thank you.    Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:47, 21 November 2019 (UTC)