Lene 

Lene said:

How do I prevent formatting from getting all messed up and farkakte? I need to be able to fix it in TRADOS because I haven't been able to fix it enough in WORD.

Trados is not a DTP tool.  You have to fix this in Word first by converting the PDF to Word before you start and then translate the Word file that you fixed.

Sometimes PDF files are easy... sometimes they are very difficult.  That's the nature of PDF files.

Actually I did! I converted to WORD but I think the problem was redaction strips in the source document.

Lene 

Aha... PDFs are often hard enough.  I imagine redacted text makes them even more difficult to translate.

A dead PDF with many charts. I've used these before but I think those black strips screwed up the formatting and it was unfixable!

Lene 

PDF are only for displaying and printing. If you are old enough to remember when they first came up - it was a relief, wonderful! Finally, you could send documents to people and you KNEW they would be displayed correctly. PDFs are great. For that. But not for anything else. Simple PDFs can be converted into Word files or text files, and there are different converters that do the job better or not quite as good. (Adobe Acrobat Pro is the best converter I know, but fortunately I don't have to do this very often.)

Best is if you can get the source document, the format that was used to generate the PDF. Might have been Word or InDesign or something like that. Otherwise there might be a lot of manual work to fix up the source document before you can start to translate.

Daniel