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Translating PDF docs

Maria Rosaria Venosa

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 
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  • 0 in reply to Paul
    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.

    _________________________________________________________

    When asking for help here, please be as accurate as possible. Please always remember to give the exact version of product used and all possible error messages received. The better you describe your problem, the better help you will get.

    Want to learn more about Trados Studio? Visit the Community Hub. Have a good idea to make Trados Studio better? Publish it here.

  • 0 in reply to Jerzy Czopik
    Hello Jerzy, I have 2017, the latest version. Yes, "manual conversion", PDF2Word via Adobe PDF Convertor, that's what I'm doing....
    Thing is I work for a client that can only give me hard copies. So the problem will persist.
  • 0 in reply to Maria Rosaria Venosa

    The problem with scanned PDFs will persist - unless you really use a decent OCR solution with a manual process. An automated conversion will never bring the results you need for smooth translation. So instead of trusting any software (including Studio) to convert a PDF, do that with OCR - like Abbyy FineReader. In my opinion this is one of the best - if not the best - available OCR solutions on the market.

    As far I understand, what Adobe is doing, is creating a Word file out of your scanned files, but it does not recognize the text inside. So what you get, is Word with images. Am I right? Word with images is even worse than a scanned PDF, as Studio treats such Word file as any other Word file, where images are simply treated as such - images, with no translatable text on it.

    _________________________________________________________

    When asking for help here, please be as accurate as possible. Please always remember to give the exact version of product used and all possible error messages received. The better you describe your problem, the better help you will get.

    Want to learn more about Trados Studio? Visit the Community Hub. Have a good idea to make Trados Studio better? Publish it here.