Can you translate pdf documents? Can you keep the layout of the translated text? Our clients often ask similar questions before sending chart-laden presentations for translation or catalogues full of pictures or charts and CAD designs. They have one thing in common: the layout of the original documents must be preserved.

Our answer is always the same: yes, we can keep the original layout but we will need the original files.

Because PDF is not enough.

PDF is always the product of another software tool in which the source document was created, such as Quark (.qxp) or Adobe InDesign (.indd).

If you have the source files we are not only able to preserve the original layout but we can make a ready-to-print translation for you.

We have accumulated ten years of experience in preparing ready-to-print translations and delivered thousands of pages of catalogues and other pdf documents.

If the source format is not available we recommend two solutions:

We scan the documents with our latest, state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR) software and, depending on the results, we make a translation that is similar to but not identical with the source document.

If, for some reason, the OCR software cannot process the document, we simply translate the text into a Word document without pictures. We keep the layout as much as possible and clearly refer to captions or other non-editable text in the translation.