Translate PDF to Kurdish (Kurmanji)

Geography answers it in most cases. People from southeastern Turkey, northern Syria, Armenia and the Dohuk area read Kurmanji, written in Latin letters from left to right. People from Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Iranian Kurdistan read Sorani, written in a modified Arabic script from right to left. In European diaspora communities both are present, and organisations that serve a mixed audience usually issue both versions rather than choosing one.

The Hawar alphabet includes ç, ê, î, ş and û, and they are letters in their own right rather than accented variants. Removing a circumflex produces a different word: the difference between the words for war and for lion, for example, is exactly that mark. Any pipeline that strips accented characters, whether a font substitution or an export to a restricted character set, corrupts the text while leaving it looking plausible.

It is common and it is workable. The Turkish alphabet has no q, w, x or ê, so Kurmanji typed on a Turkish keyboard often substitutes or omits them, and for years there were legal reasons in Turkey not to use them at all. Text of this kind is read with the missing distinctions reconstructed from context, which works well for ordinary prose. Where a personal name or a place name is affected, check it by hand, since names cannot be inferred.

Kurmanji has been written in Arabic script, mainly in Iraq and Syria, and in Cyrillic by Kurdish communities in the former Soviet Union. Modern publishing, education and diaspora media all use the Latin Hawar alphabet, and that is what the output uses. If you specifically need Arabic-script Kurdish for readers in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, what you are looking for is Sorani rather than Kurmanji in a different dress.

No. Birth certificates, identity cards, court records and school certificates from Turkey are issued in Turkish, and those from Syria in Arabic. If you have been asked to translate a Kurdish person and are holding their official paperwork, the source language is almost certainly not Kurdish. Set the source accordingly, and order a certified translation for anything being filed with an authority.

This is the grammatical point worth spot-checking. In past tense transitive sentences Kurmanji reverses its case marking, so the one performing the action takes a different form and the verb agrees with the object instead. Applying present tense patterns to a past tense sentence can swap who did what to whom, which is unacceptable in a witness statement. Read a few past tense sentences in the output before you accept a legal document.

You can, with the usual caution about literary work. Kurmanji has a substantial body of poetry, fiction and journalism, and a machine draft is a reasonable starting point for a translator or an editor. Fixed expressions, proverbs and the rhythmic structure of verse are the parts that do not survive automatic translation, so treat the output as raw material rather than as a finished literary text.

Considerably. Reception centres, clinics and legal aid offices reissue a fixed set of documents constantly, and the cost of that work is volume rather than difficulty. Translating the set automatically and having a Kurmanji speaker review the output is much faster than commissioning each sheet, and the review concentrates attention on the few passages where a legal or medical term needs a decision.