Translating PDF docs

Question

Dear fellow Translators, 
 tricky question: I have PDF docs to translate whose quality is just great. (I had hard copy and scanned them myself). However, when I open one of those in Trados.... the letters get all messed up. I do have IRIS and yes, I uninstalled it and installed it again, nothing changed. 
 Could anybody please help? 
 Thank you, 
 Rosaria

Paul · Answer

Hi Maria Rosaria Venosa , 
 
I'd like to mention that Iris is not the panacea for all PDFs ( multifarious.filkin.com/.../ ) even if it does quite a good job in general. PDFs are a problematic format because there is so much that can go wrong with them. You mentioned you scanned them yourself... I don't know how knowledgeable you are in this are so forgive me for the basic questions, but: 
 
- did you scan as text or as an image? Iris will handle both but obviously one will be better than the other. 
- what software did you use for the scanning? If it was a decent OCR software why did you save to PDF when Word would probably have been a better choice? 
 
There are probably a lot of things to write about this but let's start with the two questions above.

Paul · Answer

Hi Maria Rosaria Venosa , 
 
Can I see one of your problematic PDF files? You can email it to pfilkin@sdl.com

Jerzy Czopik · Answer

Before you send any files, just tell us the Studio version you are using: some older versions of Studio cannot convert "graphics" PDFs. And your PDFs are graphic files. This said, in my opinion the way you are trying to go will never satisfy your fully, as the conversion of PDFs - especially ike yours scanned PDFs - is always a very tricky job. So to achieve proper and good results, I would utilize an extra OCR software (like Abbyy FineReader), which can give you better results (provided you take time to achieve those and are willing to do some manual actions in the software) as any automated conversion. From my own experience (since 1990) there was, is and probably won't be any software in the world, which will convert a PDF to Word in automated way so, that no corrections will be necessary. However, when you add the extra step of manual conversion of PDF2Word the results with scanned PDFs of good quality will be great.

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Paul · Answer

Hi Maria Rosaria Venosa , 
 
Just to close this off. The problems were two fold: 
 
1. The settings for IRIS were incorrect. Just needed to uncheck "none" and ensure characters were being recognised 
2. The file was an image based PDF and not text. IRIS did a good job of the conversion, better than Easy Document Scanner 
 
So this leaves Maria with several options: 
 
1. Carry on working this way by scanning as image based PDF, open in Studio to get the OCR'd DOCX, clean up with TransTools (which we did and it worked nicely), translate the DOCX or, 
 
2. Purchase AbbyFineReader and do a better job of the hard copy document conversion to an editable and clean DOCX. Then translate the DOCX. 
 
Regards 
 
Paul

Trados Studio > 1. Trados Studio

Translating PDF docs