Jeg taler ikke særlig godt Dansk (I don’t speak particularly good Danish), but I work in a Danish university. Therefore, I often use Google Translate for translating emails from Danish to English. That works well, but it falls down a bit when I need to translate a document with formatting such as headings or tables.
Today I found a nifty way to translate these kind of documents too. You need an account with Google Docs and you need to be prepared to publish your document as a webpage.
- Upload the document to Google Docs. If it’s in the new docx format, you’ll need to save it as something else first. I’ve tried with html.
- For languages that use characters other than the basic latin alphabet (e.g. æ, ø, å), check that these haven’t turned into some other character in the process of being uploaded. I found that æ turned into ¾, ø turned into ¿, and å turned into . Use the find and replace function to revert to the proper characters.
- Choose the ‘Publish as web page…’ option from the share menu.
- You’ll be taken to another page with a publicly accessible link to your document. Copy this link.
- Go to Google Translate and paste the link into the text field.
- Choose the languages to translate from/to and click translate.
- You should see a translated version of your document with the formatting basically intact. Copy the url at the top and you should be able to share it with other people (as long as the document remains published).
Here is an example of a document that I translated this way.
If you have an account with some other online document editor (e.g. zoho writer) I guess a similar procedure could be used there.