PDF Langauge translator

ID: 361844
? PDF Langauge translator 
13.Nov.14 16:29
34

Gary Tempest (GB)
Articles: 56
Count of Thanks: 13

Hello

Does anyone know of a translator that will convert PDFs, in German, to English please?

I have tried several on the Web but none worked.

This is for a German made Philips radio and I would like to convert some of the text, particularly that about alignment, to English.

Yes!  I can do the alignment using generic methods but it always good to see what the maker suggests.

thanks Gary

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 2
Translation of Texts in PDFs 
13.Nov.14 18:44
34 from 1955

Martin Bösch (CH)
Editor
Articles: 621
Count of Thanks: 8
Martin Bösch

Dear Gary, sorry, I do not have a PDF translator software... - but some thoughts:

- the PDF format is a container format, that is used to print and display the information in a similar way on different computer systems.

- the content of PDF files can be

  • either text (try to mark is with the mouse in "text mark mode", when you can mark lines and words, the PDF has been created from electronic text file (eg. Word)
  • or images (when you try to mark it, you can do it only in "graphic marking mode", you can only mark a square area of the content, no lines of written text

 the next steps depend strongly from the form of the content:

  • if the content has been a written text (typed in with the keyboard), you can copy it using the "text mark mode" and use any translation program to translate the content, e.g. Google translate
     
  • if the content has been a graphic file, most often this will be the case with scanned pages from service manual which has been jpg or in our case png - files prior to generate a PDF, you cannot mark the text and paste it into the translator.

    You first would have to transform the graphic into written text composed from single letters and not a graphic containing dots in form of letters.

    To do this, will need an "optical character recognition" program, so called OCR. There are several types of this software on the market, for different prices.Some old version of a popular program will do the job.

    You will have to extract the graphic (the easiest way is to do a simple "screenshof" of the passage and use this as an image file, that will be read letter by letter from the OCR software.

    Then, from that software, you will ahve to export the text to a text file (e.g. Word, Wordpad) and then copy and paste it in the window of the translation software.

So you see, the way from a graphic scanned manual page back to a machine readible text, which is needed before translation, is not a short one.

I have no experience with the new type of software found on smartphones, with which you should be able to photograph written information panels, OCR read it and translate it automatically - these apps might be fine to read the menue in a restaurant, but not for alignment instructions.

Hope this helps
Martin Boesch

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 3
Translation of text from a PGF 
14.Nov.14 09:04
105 from 1955

Gary Tempest (GB)
Articles: 56
Count of Thanks: 7

Thanks Martin

I had a thought about using OCR which I haven't used for about 10 Years.  I will try it.

thanks for your help  Gary

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