Processing bilingual PDF file

Question

Dear Community! 
 is there any roundabout / plugin/miracle remedy for a non-scanned PDF file decent processing.....? 
 The problem is: PDF was received in 2 languages. The task is: replace only English texts. 
 
 I have done the following: 
 1. Convert back into Word and try to detect and highlight the French text in Word, for its further filtering in Trados. The coversion result was already a disaster.... 
 2. Upload to Trados and filter the curvisa text (English). Impossible.... 
 Is there any possibility of preparing and translating these docs??? 
 Infinitely grateful in advance!

Jesús Prieto · Answer

Yulia Kovalskaya 
 I guess you can do this: 
 
 If you can&rsquo;t get the original document used to create the PDF, you&rsquo;ll need to extract and clean the text (deleting extra returns). Manual work, I know. Maybe an AI can help you deleting extra returns. 
 If the content is big, ask an AI to extract only English text (save it to a new document) and extract only French text (save it to another document).
 
 Clean and confirm both monolingual documents (since we agree that AI work well until they fail, don&rsquo;t we?). Yeah, more manual work here.

If the content is small, create manually an English-French table (the Italic formatting may help you to move the text to the English column), and save each of the 2 columns into different documents. 
 Finally, align both documents in Trados Studio. You&rsquo;ll still need to confirm the automatic connections. And save the project to an empty TM, which I believe is what you want, don&rsquo;t you?

Paul · Answer

Yulia Kovalskaya 
 I think it's probably one of those things where the client needs to understand the process if they cannot provide translatable source files and be expected to pay for it. I would look at a process like this: 
 
 Use ABBYY FineReader PDF (or another OCR/PDF parser) and export to XML. FineReader XML gives you blocks, paragraphs, lines, characters, bounding boxes, and often xml:lang. 
 Design a lightweight schema that suits translation:
 
 Assign IDs per segment. 
 Add lang and translate attributes. 
 Only segments with translate="yes" are extracted into your translation workflow. 
 use a stylesheet to preview the full text if important

Translate the file, then save the target and push into a Word/LaTeX/HTML template (or back through FineReader if you want PDF).

Export to PDF with formatting.

It's unlikely to be perfect and you'll have some tidy up, so Word might be the better format to push into. But at least the translation process will be less problematic and clean. 
 Or... just ask the client to prepare proper source files for you! They could do this themselves and just pay for the translation.

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Processing bilingual PDF file