How to translate a PDF without copying text into a translator?

Smartcat is more suitable if you want to work through a whole report with the original and translation displayed side by side. It’s a browser-based translation platform rather than an add-on for selecting text inside your existing PDF reader.

Upload the PDF into a translation project, choose the source and target languages, and open it in the translation editor. The extracted content is divided into segments, allowing you to read the source alongside the translated text and correct wording where necessary.

That gives you a more organised comparison than repeatedly pasting paragraphs into a website. However, the editor follows extracted text segments, not necessarily the PDF’s original page layout. Scans require OCR, and recognition quality affects the translation.