Same Academic PDF, 6 Tools: Layout Preservation Compared
A 10-page Nature sub-journal paper (6 tables, 2-column layout, 50 figures, references) through 6 tools. Scored on layout, tables, images, fonts, formulas, headers.
Tools Tested
PDFTranslate, DeepL Pro, Google Translate, DocTranslator, Microsoft Translator, SDL Trados Studio.
Results
| Tool | 2-Col | Tables | Images | Fonts | Formulas | Headers | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDFTranslate | 9 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 9 | 49 |
| SDL Trados | 5 | 7 | 3 | 6 | 8 | 4 | 33 |
| Microsoft | 2 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 16 |
| DocTranslator | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 13 |
| DeepL Pro | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 9 |
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
Surprise Finding
SDL Trados — €500/year CAT tool — lost to PDFTranslate Free on table reconstruction. Trados recognized table structure but column widths were all wrong. PDFTranslate auto-rebuilt correct widths.
DeepL Pro quality is genuinely high. But output is plain text with zero layout preservation. If you need translation + formatting, DeepL is not the answer for this use case.