Preparing Multilingual Documents for AI Translation
Get better AI translations by cleaning source text, preserving structure, and handling token costs for non-English languages.
Structure carries over
Convert source documents with PDF to Markdown so headings and lists survive translation. For many files, use the Batch Document Extractor.
Watch the token count
Paste a sample into the Token Counter. Languages like Japanese or Hindi can use noticeably more tokens than English for the same content, affecting cost and chunk size.
Use a glossary
Give the model a short glossary of product names and terms that must stay consistent, and translate section by section.
Try it free in your browser
- PDF to Markdown — Headings, lists, and structure preserved. Perfect for Obsidian, GitHub, RAG, and LLM context.
- Token Counter — Live token, character, and context-window meter for any prompt. Uses official tiktoken encoders.
- Batch Document Extractor — Drop PDFs, images, Word docs, and text files together. Get clean text out — combined or zipped one-per-file. Browser-side OCR included.
Tools mentioned
Frequently asked
Why do other languages cost more tokens?
Tokenizers are trained mostly on English, so other scripts and languages often split into more tokens per word.
Should I translate in chunks?
Yes, by section. It keeps terminology consistent when you provide a glossary.
Keep reading
How to Prepare PDFs for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini
A practical guide to extracting clean, AI-ready text from PDFs — born-digital and scanned — so ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini answer accurately and don't waste tokens on headers, footers, and page numbers.
The Best Way to Feed Long Documents to Claude (and Other Long-Context Models)
Claude's 200K-token context is generous, but you'll still want to clean, compress, and structure long documents before sending them. Here's a step-by-step playbook.
Cleaning Whisper Transcripts for AI Summaries
OpenAI Whisper, Otter, and YouTube transcripts are full of timestamps, filler words, and speaker noise. Here's how to strip them before sending to ChatGPT or Claude — and why it matters.