Translate PDF to Pashto

Because the letters are not the ones you think they are. Several Pashto characters closely resemble Arabic or Persian ones and are separate code points, and text typed on an Arabic keyboard or run through a normalising tool ends up using the wrong ones. The page looks right and the file no longer matches on search, sorts incorrectly and fails to line up with records held elsewhere. Output uses the proper Pashto characters, which is what makes the resulting text searchable.

No. Dari and Farsi are varieties of Persian and belong to the western branch of the Iranian languages, while Pashto is eastern Iranian, with its own grammar, its own vocabulary and additional letters that Persian does not use. Afghanistan has both Pashto and Dari as official languages, and many documents contain both, which is why identifying the language on the page before translating matters more here than in most pairs.

Sometimes, and image quality decides it. Cursive handwriting in a right-to-left script is among the hardest material for automatic recognition, and Afghan certificates are frequently handwritten, stamped over, photocopied repeatedly and then photographed under poor light. Take the picture flat and evenly lit at the highest resolution your device allows. Where the outcome is unclear, treat the machine reading as a first pass and have a human translator confirm names and dates.

Mixed pages are normal in Afghan paperwork and are read as such rather than being forced into one language. The two share most of their letters, so a tool that guesses a single language for the whole file will translate one of them wrongly while producing text that looks fluent. If your document is bilingual, say so, and check both parts of the output rather than only the section you expected.

Naskh, the upright style, which is the convention for Pashto. Nastaliq, the sloping calligraphic style, belongs to Urdu and to Persian poetry, and Pashto set in it looks out of place to a Pashto reader. Software that assumes any Arabic-script South Asian language is Urdu will reach for Nastaliq automatically. The output is set in an appropriate face and the font is embedded so the file does not fall back to something unsuitable on another device.

Not as the submitted version. Immigration authorities require a translation accompanied by a signed certification that it is complete and accurate, which an automatic tool cannot provide. What machine translation does well in these cases is triage: reading a stack of letters, certificates and reports quickly so a caseworker knows what is in the file and which documents need certifying. Order a certified translation for the filing itself.

Less than you might expect for written material. The southwestern and northeastern dialect groups differ mainly in pronunciation, particularly of the retroflex letters, while the spelling stays the same, so a written document travels between Kandahar and Peshawar without difficulty. Vocabulary is where the split shows: administrative and technical words are borrowed from Dari in Afghanistan and from Urdu or English in Pakistan, so a term familiar on one side of the border may not be on the other.

Less width than the English in most cases, since the script is compact and short vowels are not written, but more height per line, because letters carry dots and marks above and below the baseline and descenders are deep. Documents laid out with tight line spacing for Latin type are the ones that suffer. Tables and forms also mirror, so column order flips, which is worth confirming before a document is printed.