How To Translate A PDF With Google Translate

Today we are going to learn in this tutorial how to translate a PDF in Chrome browser with your Google Translate Chrome extension or directly on the official ‘Google Translate’ web page (no chrome extension needed)

If you are an English native speaker, you are fortunate that many websites and online PDF documents are all written in English. However, on occasion, you will find that the PDF you have found is written in a foreign language. What if the PDF document is written in Spanish, French, or any other language? Or maybe you are not an English native speaker and are missing out on a wealth of useful information?

 Does this situation put you at a disadvantage? In the past, it would have, but nowadays web translators and other AI-driven translation services have changed all that. 

 Today we will show you how to translate a PDF as easily as you can translate online websites or portions of text using an online web translator.  

If you have never used a translating tool on web texts, we highly recommend you use this opportunity to learn about the Google translate extension for your Chrome browser. As we have covered in our tutorial ’ how to install and use Google Translate for our Google Chrome browser’, We have learned how to install the Google Chrome add-on for your browser. this has enabled us to quickly Translate any online text on the website and even translate the entire webpage altogether. If you want to learn how to get the Google Translate extension for your Chrome browser, feel free to check out the article in the link below.

However, what do you do when the information you want to translate is written on a PDF document? Google translate does not translate an online PDF automatically, so what can we do about this?

 The good news is that there is nothing to worry about, with a simple and easy extra step we are going to help Google Translate translate that PDF document for us.

Learn how to translate a PDF document with Google Translate 

Go to TRANSLATE.GOOGLE.COM

Google Translate has a specific section where you can upload and translate a PDF document. So, first, we must locate the Google translate website. You can do this either by using the Google Chrome Extension in your Chrome browser or searching for Google Translate URL in your browser.

1. Using the Google Chrome Extension

*Then click on ‘GOOGLE TRANSLATE’

*Click on the Google Chrome Extension on the top right of your browser

If you want to download the Google translate Chrome Extension for your Chrome browser, you can find it in the Google Webstore!

Note 1: The Google Chrome Webstore is the official Google web store, so you can be confident that these ‘Chrome extensions’ are legitimate, and safe to add to your chrome browser.

Note 2: It is very easy to ADD + also to REMOVE Google Chrome extensions without any hassle!

2.Do a search for Google Translate homepage

*Make a websearch to https://translate.google.com

Use Google Translate Tool for PDF document translation

• 1. –>Click on ‘Documents’ –> This will open a section of Google Translate which is especially designed to upload and translate all kinds of documents. Today we’ll use it to demonstrate how easy it is to translate a PDF document with Google Translate.

• 2. –>Select the ORIGIN LANGUAGE and the DESTINATION LANGUAGE for the PDF you which to translate. –> You can either set it at ‘detect language’ –> Google Translate will detect the language automatically, or you can select the language in which the PDF document is written yourself. You can select any of the 65 languages in which you want the document to be translated. We are choosing to translate the PDF in English. 

• 3. –>Select PDF Document on your computer –> Simply select the PDF file that needs to be translated and upload the document online. Goolge uses online cloud translation tools to perform the translation. We’d recommend that the file only contains 1 language to translate for optimal results.

• 5. –>Click on ‘Translate’ –> Once you have uploaded the PDF you want to translate, simply click translate. In our case, we have prepared a test PDF. The PDF contains sentences in several different languages, including sentences with 2 languages. We will show you the results of our test in this tutorial. We will also leave you the link of this file here for you to download, if you want to copy our steps and you don’t have a PDF yourself containing foreign languages. 

• 5. –>DOWNLOAD TRANSLATED PDF DOCUMENT –> You are done! Your document has been translated to the destination language and is ready for download! If you want to see what the results were of our translation test with our PDF, just check out our next section. 

Check The Results of our Google Translate — PDF Translation TEST

In order to test if Google Translate works as you would expect, we thought we’d make it extra hard and created a small PDF document which contained multiple languages and used the ‘Google Translate Document Translation section to auto-detect the origin languages and translate the PDF to English. 

In the image below you see a screenshot of the original file. We wrote a sentence in 4 different languages and then added 2 sentences which contained 2 languages each.

As you can see, Google Translate detected the different languages and translated everything to ENGLISH. Note that Google Translate did have some problems if you would put 2  languages in the same sentence. Obviously, this is not usually the case and Google Translate does a great job at translating a PDF document for you. 

Goolge Translate does more than only translating PDF documents for you!

If you are interested in using Google Translate for all your translation tasks, we’d recommend you to consider downloading the Google Chrome Extension for your Chrome browser. It is a really helpful tool to have your personal webtranslator closeby!

If you want to learn how to install and use the Google Translate Chrome Extension, you can check our Installation tutorial here: https://studychicken.com/how-to-use-and-install-google-translate-extension-for-chrome/