January 4th, late, late evening. Let me jot down a few words about the translator’s dilemma in the 21st century. On the one hand we are expected to use CAT tools and offer CAT discounts, but on the other we often receive documents for translation in a format which is not directly editable, for example PDF.

A few more recent versions of SDL Trados Studio can convert PDF files into their internal SDLXLIFF format and produce a Word file with translation at the end, but this process is not without problems. Once I converted a large PDF file, did the pseudotranslation and roundtripping test just to be on the safe side, but I wasn't on the safe side anyway! When I was done with my translation, the final document failed to export, even though all tags were correct.

That is why I prefer to use ABBYY Finereader to prepare PDF files for translation. And on top of that I mark text, table and image areas manually, to have ultimate control over layout. It is tedious work, but it pays off later.

It so happens that until January 10th new Finereader licenses are available with a 30% discount, for Windows: https://goo.gl/Int8lB and for MacOS: https://goo.gl/W4gCwZ