Technical forums » Software applications »
Good PDF to Word converter?
Thread poster: Paul Denlinger
Paul Denlinger
Paul Denlinger  Identity Verified
United States
Chinese to English
Feb 9, 2016

I am looking for recommendations for a good PDF to Word converter.

I use SDL Trados Studio 2015 and Wordfast Pro, translating from Chinese into English. Sometimes I get a PDF source document, but neither program does an acceptable job of PDF conversion. Most of the time I just get garbled characters which make the source document useless.

For this reason, I'm looking for a good PDF to Word converter which can handle Chinese. Any recommendations?
 
José J. Martínez
José J. Martínez  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 07:27
Member
English to Spanish
+ ...
PDF Converter Feb 9, 2016

The one I like the most is ABBYY...it costs about USD$70.00 for one time. Also the Wordfast anywhere is quite good... The Adobe costs you $10.00 per month but is quite inaccurate especially if the documents are not at a true vertical.
 
Preston Decker
Preston Decker  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 10:27
Chinese to English
RE Feb 9, 2016

Paul Denlinger wrote:

I am looking for recommendations for a good PDF to Word converter.

I use SDL Trados Studio 2015 and Wordfast Pro, translating from Chinese into English. Sometimes I get a PDF source document, but neither program does an acceptable job of PDF conversion. Most of the time I just get garbled characters which make the source document useless.

For this reason, I'm looking for a good PDF to Word converter which can handle Chinese. Any recommendations?

Paul, see my response from last week here: http://www.proz.com/forum/smart_shoppers/203263-pdf_converter-page2.html#2517040

Office 2016 is not perfect by any means for CN>EN, but it's at least half-decent (and the price is very reasonable). I generally don't trust OCR documents at all for actual translation, and I have a feeling there are better products out there than Office, but Office does at least help in determining a final word count.
 
Stepan Konev
Stepan Konev  Identity Verified
Russian Federation
Local time: 17:27
English to Russian
Try this Feb 9, 2016

http://smallpdf.com/
(Select English or Chinese language as needed)

[Edited at 2016-02-09 20:44 GMT]
 
Adam Warren
Adam Warren  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 16:27
Member (2005)
French to English
I use, and recommend Nuance Power PDF Advanced Feb 18, 2016

I bought this package for 69 euros in 2014, and while I agree that OCR can be dicey, there are ways of taming editable documents derived from scans:

- eliminate tables and graphics if they cause problems, marking their location;
- unify the font, its size, spacing, proportion, etc., while being careful no to interfere with index and exponent characters.

The idea is to eliminate as many unwanted tags as possible for work in a CAT editor.

Link: nuance.com

I hope this helps.

With kind regards,

Adam Warren
(ProZ.com: IanDhu, Translator 41189) ▲ Collapse
 
Artem Vakhitov
Artem Vakhitov  Identity Verified
Kyrgyzstan
English to Russian
+ ...
See my recommendation for Finereader here Feb 18, 2016

http://www.proz.com/forum/smart_shoppers/203263-pdf_converter-page2.html#2522374

I retract the part about PDF Transformer 2.0 in your case because this version doesn't seem to understand Chinese. Well, you can't easily obtain it anyway nowadays...

[Edited at 2016-02-18 23:11 GMT]
 


To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator:

Moderator(s) of this forum
Natalie[Call to this topic]
Prachya Mruetusatorn[Call to this topic]

You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request »

Good PDF to Word converter?






Trados Business Manager Lite
Create customer quotes and invoices from within Trados Studio

Trados Business Manager Lite helps to simplify and speed up some of the daily tasks, such as invoicing and reporting, associated with running your freelance translation business.

More info »
Trados Studio 2022 Freelance
The leading translation software used by over 270,000 translators.

Designed with your feedback in mind, Trados Studio 2022 delivers an unrivalled, powerful desktop and cloud solution, empowering you to work in the most efficient and cost-effective way.

More info »