OCR PDF translation
OCR and PDF Translation: What to Know
How OCR turns scanned PDFs into translatable text, what affects accuracy, and how to review the result.
OCR is the bridge between a scan and a translation
A scanned PDF is a picture of a page. Optical character recognition reads that picture and turns it into machine-readable text, which can then be translated. Skip or botch the OCR step, and the translation inherits every misread character.
What makes OCR accurate
High resolution, straight pages, strong contrast, and clean fonts all help. Photos taken at an angle, curved book spines, faint print, stamps, and handwriting are harder, and they are where most OCR errors come from.
Review where OCR is most likely to slip
Numbers, codes, names, and anything in small print deserve a manual check. A single misread digit in an amount or a reference number can quietly change the meaning of a translated document.
Improve the source when you can
If a scan is poor, re-scanning or re-photographing the page with better light and a flat surface often does more for the final translation than any setting in the app.