How to Convert and Translate a Hindi PDF to English
Question details
The user needs to extract text from a Hindi PDF document and convert or translate it into editable English text.
- Product
- PDF Tools
- Device & OS
- not provided
- Scenario
- Translating a foreign language document from Hindi to English for editing, reading, or official use.
- Observed behavior
- The user wants to obtain an editable English document from a source Hindi PDF file, which may involve recognizing scanned text.
Check whether your Hindi PDF contains selectable text or is a scanned image. Scanned documents will require OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract the text before it can be translated.
Extract Hindi Text Using OCR and Translate to English
Use a PDF editor with OCR capabilities to extract text from scanned Hindi PDFs, export it to an editable format, and then translate the document.
If the PDF is an image or scanned document, standard translation tools cannot read the text directly. You must first convert the image to machine-readable text using an OCR tool, ensuring the correct language is selected to prevent garbled output.
Open your PDF editor (such as Adobe Acrobat) and run the OCR tool. In the OCR settings, ensure you select 'Hindi' as the document language so the software accurately recognizes the characters.
Once the text is recognized, export or save the file as a Microsoft Word document (.docx) or Plain Text file (.txt).
Upload the exported Word document to a reliable translation tool (such as Google Translate, DeepL, or an integrated Word translator) and select English as the target translation language.
Carefully review the translated English document. Manually correct any formatting errors, technical terms, or proper nouns that might have been mistranslated.
Use WPS Office to Convert and Edit Multi-Language PDFs
WPS Office provides a comprehensive PDF toolkit, including a highly accurate OCR feature that can extract text from scanned multi-language documents. Seamlessly convert your PDFs to editable Word documents to prepare them for translation.
- 1. Open PDF in WPS Office: Launch WPS Office and open your Hindi PDF document using the WPS PDF tool.
- 2. Apply OCR: Navigate to the 'Tools' tab and click on the 'OCR' button. Select the appropriate language settings to extract the text accurately.
- 3. Convert to Word: Click 'PDF to Word' within the conversion tools to save the extracted text as a fully editable Microsoft Word document.
- 4. Edit and Translate: Open the newly created Word document in WPS Writer to apply translations, adjust formatting, and finalize your English text.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I translate a PDF without converting it to Word first?
Some online translation tools allow you to upload a PDF directly for translation. However, if the PDF is scanned or image-based, direct translation will fail. You must first use OCR to make the text recognizable.
Why is the translated text showing up as strange symbols?
This typically happens if the OCR process did not correctly identify the Hindi characters, or if the PDF uses non-standard embedded fonts. Ensure you explicitly select 'Hindi' as the recognition language during the OCR step.
Is there a free way to extract text from a Hindi PDF?
Yes, you can use free online OCR services or the built-in OCR features in free software like WPS Office. Once the text is extracted to a standard text format, you can paste it into free services like Google Translate.
