Guides & How-Tos
Practical, step-by-step guides for translating documents without breaking their layout — covering every file type and translation engine DocTranslating supports.
Getting started
How to translate a document without losing its formatting
DocTranslating translates PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, code and subtitle files into 100+ languages while keeping the original layout, fonts, tables and images in place. Upload a file, pick a language and one of four translation engines (DeepL, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Gemini), then download a translated copy that looks like the original. This guide covers the full process plus the real-world edge cases — scanned PDFs, footnotes and text boxes, terminology consistency, file-size limits and right-to-left languages.
11 min read
How-to
How to translate a scanned PDF file
Scanned PDFs are images of text, not actual text — which is why most translators including Google Translate either reject them, return an empty result, or show a "can't translate this file" error. To translate a scanned PDF you need OCR (text extraction) before translation. DocTranslating runs OCR automatically as part of the translation pipeline, supports 100+ languages, and rebuilds the translated text into a copy of the original PDF. For accuracy on important documents, verify the OCR output first on PDFEquips so extraction errors don't compound with translation errors.
8 min read