How to Translate PDF & Word Documents with Google Translation

Written by Amit Agarwal on June 13, 2008 Text Size

google translate pdf Say dad bought you a digital camera from Japan but the problem is that the PDF manual that came with the camera is also written in Japanese.

How do you quickly translate that PDF file into an English document ?

Solution: If the PDF document is not password protected, you can easily convert it into another language via Google Translate.

The idea is that you extract the text from the PDF file and pass it to Google Translate. Here’s how:

Step 1: Open Zoho Viewer (review) and upload the file(s). Other than PDF, you may also upload common Office file formats like doc, xls and ppt.

Step 2: Zoho Viewer provides a unique URL for each of your web document. Go to Google Translate, type that web address, select a language pair and hit the Translate button. Voilà!

Important: If the source document is multi-lingual, you should considering uploading to Slideshare since they handle foreign languages slightly better than Zoho Viewer. See a sample document from Zoho and Slideshare.

Slideshare will create a text transcript of your PDF document that can you pass on to Google Translate for converting into another language.

You may even extract text from PDF documents using Adobe Reader itself but again, this program doesn’t work too well with all languages.