It has been roughly three years since we released the Document Translation service as part of the SAP Translation Hub product offering. As of November 2023, an intuitive and user-friendly interface enables all users to quickly and easily translate their text and documents with Document Translation from SAP Translation Hub.

Document Translation is a machine translation service hosted on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) that has been trained with special focus on SAP-related content. You may have heard about the service being integrated in other products or processes, such as SAP Enable Now or SAP Notes and SAP Knowledge Base Articles.

But Document Translation works as a standalone service too! It can be used via API to request documents to be translated. However, for users without a developer background, that wasn’t always easy to set up. That is why we decided to start working to provide an intuitive and simple interface to interact with the service. Earlier this year, we ran a Customer Engagement Initiative (CEI) where we gathered feedback and additional requirements for the service, and now the first version is ready to go!

How does it look?

The new interface enables you to translate text and documents easily and is very user-friendly. The language scope remains the same as already available via API, as well as the document types that you can translate.

Using the Text Translation option, you can type or paste text to translate up to 10,000 characters at once. If you cannot identify the language that you want to translate from, you can use the Language Detection toggle (which is also a functionality available via API). Just select the target language of your choice and get your translation back instantly.

In addition to text translation, you can also translate documents. Simply upload them on the File Translation tab, select the language from the dropdown menu and download the result. You can translate documents in the following translation formats: HTML, PDF, .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .txt and XLIFF. The target files are stored for up to 72 hours after you translate them in case you need to access them again. Afterwards, they are automatically deleted. To protect the privacy of your content, the files you translate remain only available to you, even if you share the same SAP BTP application with several users.

Besides, we have a bonus!

As a bonus, we have also enabled something we have often been asked to support over the years – translation from PDF as source format!

Translating from PDF documents is not an easy task, as the PDF file must first be converted into an editable format that can be used for translation. This is a challenging task, as what we consume as a PDF file may originate from a Word document, a PowerPoint presentation, or a Content Management System (CMS) that hosts xml-based files, to name a few. We decided to integrate Adobe services to realize the conversion, so that when you upload a PDF to Document Translation, Adobe converts the PDF into a translatable format, and you can download the translated version. The translated version will be a Word version of the PDF, so you can easily review the translation quality (always recommended) and make any required changes. Please bear in mind that the formatting may be significantly altered by the conversion mechanisms and may also require adjustment.

What’s next for the Document Translation service?

Soon we will also release a booster to automate the entitlement creation process in SAP BTP and make it even easier to use the Document Translation service.

Stay tuned for updates!

Further information