Antonella Pecchioli 

Unfortunately PDF files are just tricky!  We also had problems with IRIS technically, it was a 3rd party technology we paid for and it didn't always work well.  So in 2022 you'll see we removed the PDF filetype altogether that worked with IRIS and have replaced it with something new.  Unfortunately the new filetype doesn't OCR at all, but we did create a free plugin for 2022 that does a reasonable job most of the time.  You can read about it here:

 PDF Assistant for Trados 

The principle with this is to use the app to convert the file to a DOCX first. Then you can tidy up the PDF as needed, and I recommend TransTools to help with this:

https://www.translatortools.net/products/transtools

Ideally, I think if you get a lot of PDF files to work on, it may be worth investing in something like Adobe Acrobat ( https://www.adobe.com/acrobat.html ) or Abbyy FineReader ( https://pdf.abbyy.com/ ) as these tools provide better control over the editing of PDF files so that you can prepare them properly for translation first.

Thank you Paul for your clear answer. Do you think that the app IRIS can create troubles (as from its installation appear error messages...) and it's better if I remove it? 

Thank you Paul for your clear answer. Do you think that the app IRIS can create troubles (as from its installation appear error messages...) and it's better if I remove it? 

Antonella Pecchioli 

Antonella Pecchioli said:

Do you think that the app IRIS can create troubles (as from its installation appear error messages...) and it's better if I remove it? 

I wouldn't be 100% certain, but I have seen problems in the past with OCR.  Although the PDF itself can also be the cause of how successful you would be with this tool.  They are simply not designed to be translated... it's always better to get the original source.  I know that's not always possible so all CAT tools have tried to do something to address this... some try to retain formatting, some just extract text etc.  But in the end my own opinion is I would always take a tool that that designed to handle PDFs and create a file that can be properly translated first.

In my own life I actually use two free tools for managing this stuff.

• NAPS - Not Another PDF Scanner to scan in documents I get as hard copy
• FreeOCR - a small tool that uses Google Tesseract and has support for OCR'ing many languages

Not even close to the capabilities offered by some of the commercial tools but they suit my needs and it's often a lot faster to simple get the text, remove the line breaks... all of which FreeOCR will support quite nicely... and then just recreate the layout in Word myself.  Normally doesn't take long and the effort at the start means the translation process is not only problem free, but the final file is perfect.  So effort at the start means no effort needed at the end.