Japanese PDF convert to English
 

Some Apexi manuals are in Japanese and I want to convert the text to English. The google translate would be fine but it won't do pdfs. The pdf2txt type utilities either give access errors or replace the Japanese characters with ?

The Adobe site lets you submit a PDF to convert to txt or html but gives an access error with these.

http://www.apexi.co.jp/pro_apexi/ele...07-0040-04.pdf

http://www.apexi.co.jp/pro_apexi/ele...07-0480-00.pdf

Hi John. I think you may be screwed on this.

I think that Google Translate only works if there is recognisable text in the file (eg. The quick brown fox....). It will look for the text and translate this to whatever language you want. So in French it would be something like "La vite brune <whatever the French for fox is>. It may be a literal word-for-word translation, so you might get the sense of what was meant, but you're not going to pass a GCSE French with that translation.

Your PDFs are probably graphic files. These will not be storing the text as a string of characters like (the Japanese equivalent of) "The quick brown fox....". Instead, it will be storing the image as a pattern of dots - the pattern of dots that are required to represent each page.

Any translation program can only work with text files (unless anyone knows of Japanese OCR software). As it is a graphic file, it could equally easily be a photo of a mountain. Translation software generally can't make sense of graphic files.

What you can sometimes do is copy the text out, make a web page using the text, host it and then get Google to translate it.
Sadly in this case te document is locked and you can't even copy the text out of it. You can actually highlight it so it is text.
Maybe Acrobat Distiller can get it out, not too sure as I don't know much about it...

Found a password remover but it only does the first 50% of the document. But I can then paste text into google and get useful info. Trying to find a way to get the rest!!

Sorted: used a PDF splitter/joiner to join the two pdfs together which also removed the password. Now I can put the fillets of text into google and get a gist. There were just a few things I wanted to see what it said on particular adjustments :)