If you happen to find documents or instruction manuals on the internet available only in a foreign language, perhaps one of those incomprehensible to most such as Russian, Chinese or Japanese, translating them can become a real undertaking if you do not use specialized automatic software. In particular, the difficulties are in the presence of long documents or formatted in particular ways, with tables, diagrams and figures such as PDFs.
1) The first option that is used when making translations is always Google Translate, which also allows you to translate Word and PDF document files.
From the main site you can click the link to translate a document and upload the PDF file or the Word or Excel document to have the instant translation in Italian or any other language. The limitation of the Google translator is that if you load a document formatted in a certain way, what you receive as a result is only a text file, thus completely losing the original formatting.
2) The Google translator is also one of the tools that can be used from the main Google Docs menu, a service on which Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents can be uploaded online in order to obtain immediate and automatic translation. From the Tools menu at the top, you can press on Translate document to get an immediate translation of Word, Excel or Powerpoint files.
3) A more precise translation service that can be used for free is that of the Deepl site , a better translator than Google, which offers the possibility of uploading documents and text files in order to receive them back translated into the chosen language. On the Deepl website, you can press the " translate file " button to upload the document and translate it into the chosen language. Deepl supports Word and Powerpoint files, not PDFs.
4) A free online translation service that also maintains the formatting of the original documents, you can try it with the online tool of the Doctranslator site. In this site you just need to upload the PDF or Word file, select the target language, Italian and then wait to be able to re-download the translated document. DocTranslator internally uses the Google Translate translation engine, therefore it supports all the languages of the world and the file formats .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, .xls, .xlsx, .odt, .ods, .odp, .pdf, .srt, and .txt.
5) Another way of translating documents on PC is with the original Microsoft Word program which has the translation tool in the Revision menu.
6) You can also translate written texts using the Microsoft Translate app for Windows 10.
7) To translate PDF you can use Foxit Reader, a PDF reader. With Foxit Reader, open the PDF to be translated, then register for a free Foxit Cloud account using the drop-down icon at the top right. After doing so, from the Extras tab, click on the Translate icon. You can then ask to translate only the selected lines or the whole page.
Since translating Word documents is easier than translating PDF, it is better to use programs to convert PDF to Word and then use the Microsoft program or the Google translator to obtain instant translation.
Among the professional software there are some tools that deal with managing translation memories, but the most famous for automatically translating foreign languages on Word are basically two: Trados and Wordfast, which can be tried for free.
Trados is a real software, with a very expensive license, which works constantly connected to a server to keep translation memories updated . This type of software divides the source language text into segments (tags) which will be translated into as many tags in the target language. It is the most used program in large software houses.
Wordfast instead, although in some ways quite similar to Trados, is not a real software but a plugin for Word, which works as an assisted translation tool.
