Translate PDF files and Office documents with Google!

Let’s say you need a vital piece of information in your research, and that the only document you have is in Spanish. And it’s a 200-page document, and you really need to translate that quick. By “quick,” I mean “within the next hour.” I can imagine the frustration you might have if you’re in that situation. I should know; just thinking about it is making my head hurt.

I honestly didn’t expect this, but darn, I should have seen this coming. Google Translate is now able to read PDF files and Microsoft Office documents. This little bit of magic is done by everybody’s favorite online language translator by converting the document to the HTML format first and then subsequently displaying the translated HTML file.

And amazingly, Google Translate converts on the fly. So even if the PDF was just uploaded a while ago and is not yet indexed by Google, it will be translated.

To use this new feature, you just need to use Google Translate normally: just go to the site, and enter the URL of the document.

Choose the language you want the translation to go through (I’m assuming you want to translate, say, a Spanish PDF to English). Then click on “Translate”. Wait.

And there you go, your own on-the-fly translated document!

Honestly, what I want to see is a optionthat will let you upload your own files to Google Translate instead of having to enter a URL from a separate website. That one’s going to be a definite timesaver.

Now I’ve heard some issues of Google Translate not being able to translate large documents. For example, a 198-page PDF had only the first 9 pages translated. But some reports are coming in that Google Translate is able to do its work completely without a hitch at all.

I’ve tried it myself, and I don’t see any problem at all. The 200-page PDF I tried was translated completely.

But of course, the best way to see if this works is to try it out yourselves! And let’s talk about how awesome (or how bad) the translation process is here.