New to me: Google Translate now works on foreign-language PDFs. Perhaps it’s been available for a while, but I’ve seen no-one blogging about it.

It doesn’t work if you just right-click on the Web link to the PDF in, say, Google Scholar or JURN search results, and then select “Translate this page…”.

Instead you have to:

1) Right-click, and copy to the clipboard the direct PDF link.
2) Visit Google Translate, manually paste in the URL you just copied.
3) Click on the URL that appears over in the facing box.
4) The PDF text appears extracted, in the form of a Web page, and translated.

Very useful, and I had excellent results with a Polish article I tested. I had the whole article translated, too, not just the first few paragraphs. Longer items such as a PhD thesis will be refused as “too long”.

Note that a ‘redirect URL’, which gives the PDF but hides the direct URL link to the PDF, is of no use in the above workflow.

Sadly I guess it’s also a route to plagiarism for students. I’d suggest that the anti-plagiarism detector-bot services might usefully build a bank of Google-translated theses and dissertations, to add to their phrase-detection sources. Teachers who mark suspiciously-excellent final dissertations, and who are then inclined ‘to go on the hunt’, should also be aware of the possibility that the lacklustre student may have run a foreign dissertation through Google Translate and then lightly re-written it for clarity in English.