But don't worry, there are a great number of PDF translators you can choose from. Some of them are even free to use, and you can use them to translate your PDFs without losing data. This post lists the five best PDF translators that you can use online and offline, come and check them.
Many people use Google Docs, but only part of you might be aware of its function as a translator. You can sign up with your Google account, and Google Docs will provide you with the option to "Translate document". It's a free online translator, and a user can translate the PDF files into different languages.
Multilizer PDF Translator 2011 with key
Google Docs is a great translator for PDF text, but you may lose images if the PDF files contain pictures and graphics. For PDF files that contain images and graphics, it would be better to convert the file into Word documents and translate the content with other tools.
Protranslate is another online translator for PDF that can translate documents into different languages. With one click, it translates your files to over 70 languages. Moreover, you can use the online tool for PDF translation without being worried about data loss. Furthermore, it provides flyer translation so that you can translate image files as well.
This overview of CAT systems includes only those computer applications specifically designed with translation in mind. It does not discuss word processors, spelling and grammar checkers, and other electronic resources which, while certainly of great help to translators, have been developed for a broader user base. Nor does it include applications such as concordancers which, although potentially incorporating features similar to those in a typical CAT system, have been developed for computational linguists.
CAT systems fundamentally enable the reuse of past (human) translation held in so-called translation memory (TM) databases, and the automated application of terminology held in terminology databases. These core functionalities may be supplemented by others such as alignment tools, to create TM databases from previously translated documents, and term extraction tools, to compile searchable term bases from TMs, bilingual glossaries, and other documents. CAT systems may also assist in extracting the translatable text out of heavily tagged files, and in managing complex translation projects with large numbers and types of files, translators and language pairs while ensuring basic linguistic and engineering quality assurance.
Historically, CAT system development was somewhat ad hoc, with most concerted effort and research going into MT instead. CAT grew organically, in response to the democratization of processing power (personal computers opposed to mainframes) and perceived need, with the pioneer developers being translation agencies, corporate localization departments, and individual translators. Some systems were built for in-house use only, others to be sold.
Whether bolt-on or standalone, a CAT system editor first segments the source file into translation units, enabling the translator to work on them separately and the program to search for matches in the memory. Inside the editor window, the translator sees the active source segment displayed together with a workspace into which the system will import any hits from the memory and/or allow a translation to be written from scratch. The workspace can appear below (vertical presentation) or beside (horizontal or tabular presentation) the currently active segment.
When the source is presented in side-by-side, tabular form, Déjà Vu being the classic example, the translator activates a particular segment by placing the cursor in the corresponding cell; depending on the (user adjustable) search settings, the most relevant database information is imported into the target cell on the right, with additional memory and glossary data presented either in a sidebar or at bottom of screen.
When the translator opens a segment in the editor window, the program compares it to existing entries in the database:If it finds a source segment in the database that precisely coincides with the segment the translator is working on, it retrieves the corresponding target as an exact match (or a 100 per cent match); all the translator need do is check whether it can be reused as-is, or whether some minor adjustments are required for potential differences in context.
If it finds a databased source segment that is similar to the active one in the editor, it offers the target as a fuzzy match together with its degree of similarity, indicated as a percentage and calculated on the Levenshtein distance, i.e. the minimum number of insertions, deletions or substitutions required to make it equal; the translator then assesses whether it can be usefully adapted, or if less effort is required to translate from scratch; usually, only segments above a 70 per cent threshold are offered, since anything less is deemed more distracting than helpful.
If it fails to find any stored source segment exceeding the pre-set match threshold, no suggestion is offered; this is called a no match, and the translator will need to translate that particular segment in the conventional way.
By contrast, big corporations can afford dedicated bureaus staffed with trained terminologists to both create and maintain industry-wide multilingual term bases. These will be enriched with synonyms, definitions, examples of usage, and links to pictures and external information to assist any potential users, present or future. For large corporate projects it is also usual practice to construct product-specific glossaries which impose uniform usages for designated key terms, with contracting translators or agencies being obliged to abide by them.
Regardless, with corporations needing to maintain lexical consistency across user interfaces, Help files, documentation, packaging and marketing material, translating without a terminology feature has become inconceivable. Indeed, the imposition of specific vocabulary can be so strict that many CAT systems have incorporated quality assurance (QA) features which raise error flags if translators fail to observe authorised usage from designated term bases.
These changes also signalled a new era of remuneration. Eventually all commercial systems were able to batch-process incoming files against the available memories, and pre-translate them by populating the target side of the relevant segments with any matches. Effectively, that same analysis process meant quantifying the number and type of matches as well as any internal repetition, and the resulting figures could be used by project managers to calculate translation costs and time. Individual translators working with discrete clients could clearly project-manage and translate alone, and reap any rewards in efficiency themselves. However, for large agencies with demanding clients, the potential savings pointed elsewhere.
Not all activity occurred in a commercial context. The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community also needed to localize software and translate documentation. That task fell less to conventional professional translators, and more to computer-savvy and multilingual collectives who could design perfectly adequate systems without the burden of commercial imperatives. OmegaT, written in Java and thus platform independent, was and remains the most developed open software system.
Attempts at augmenting CAT with automation began in the 1990s, but the available desktop MT was not really powerful or agile enough, trickling out as discrete builds on CD-ROM. As remarked above, Lingotek in 2006 was the first to launch a web-based CAT integrated with a mainframe powered MT; SDL Trados soon followed suit, and then all the others. With machines now producing useable first drafts, there are potential gains in pipelining MT-generated output to translators via their CAT editor. The payoff is twofold: enterprises can do so in a familiar environment (their chosen CAT system), whilst leveraging from legacy data (their translation memories and terminology databases).
Now, these same massive translation memories that have been assembled to empower SMT can also significantly assist human translation. Free on-line access allows translators to tackle problematic sentences and phrases by querying the database, just as they would with the concordance feature in their own CAT systems and memories. The only hitch is working within a separate application, and transferring results across: what would be truly useful is the ability to access such data without ever needing to leave the CAT editor window. It would enable translators to query worldwide repositories of translation solutions and import any exact and fuzzy matches directly.
It is only recently that all major developers have engaged with the task, usually combining indexing with predictive typing, suggestions popping up as the translator types the first letters. Each developer has its own implementation and jargon for sub-segmental matching: MultiTrans and Lingotek, following TAUS, call it Advanced Leveraging; memoQ refers to Longest Substring Concordance; Star-Transit has Dual Fuzzy, and Déjà Vu X2 has DeepMiner. Predictive typing is variously described as AutoSuggest, AutoComplete, AutoWrite etc.
Microsoft Word-based TM editors (such as Trados Workbench and Wordfast) had one great blessing: translators could operate within a familiar environment (Word) whilst remaining oblivious to the underlying coding that made the file display. Early proprietary interfaces could handle other file types, but could become uselessly cluttered with in-line formatting tags (displayed as icons in Tag Editor, paint-brushed sections in SDLX, or a numeric code in curly brackets).
As for typing per se, history is being revisited with a modern twist. In the typewriter era, speed could be increased by having expert translators dictate to expert typists. With the help of speech recognition software, dictation has returned for major supported languages at least. 2ff7e9595c
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