Can I translate PDF files?

Yes, by selecting text. Mate translates the words or paragraphs you select in a PDF and shows the result next to them. It doesn't take a PDF file and hand back a translated file.

How it works depends on where you open the PDF:

• Mac: select text in Preview or any PDF app, right-click, and choose Services › Translate with Mate Translate. Or copy the text and press Option+Shift+T. Details in Translate PDFs on your Mac.
• iPhone and iPad: select text, tap Share, then Translate with Mate. Or set Mate as your default translator and tap Translate in the selection menu. Details in Translate PDFs on iPhone and iPad.
• Chrome: select text in Chrome's PDF viewer, right-click, and choose the Mate item. Details in Translate PDFs with the Chrome extension.
• Firefox, Edge, Opera, Safari: these browsers don't let extensions into their PDF viewers, so selection translation doesn't work there. Open the PDF in Preview, in Chrome, or on your iPhone instead.

Scanned PDFs

If the PDF is a scan, the text is an image and can't be selected. On Mac, Preview's Live Text recognizes text in scanned PDFs on macOS 13 and later, so you can select it and use the Services menu as usual. On iPhone, use Mate's camera on the page, or on the screen.

Long documents

Mate's input takes up to 20,000 characters at a time on Mac, so you can paste whole pages. For a complete translated document you'd need a document translation service, which Mate isn't.