Translate PDF to Scots Gaelic

No, and the two are constantly confused because both are counted in the Scottish census. Gaelic is a Celtic language related to Irish and Manx. Scots is a Germanic language closely related to English, and a text in it is broadly comprehensible to an English reader. If someone has asked you for a Scots version of a document, they may mean either, so it is worth confirming which before you commission anything.

They share an ancestor and a good deal of vocabulary, and a reader of one can make sense of a fair amount of the other, but the spelling conventions and the accent systems differ and the everyday vocabulary has diverged. Irish set before a Gaelic-speaking audience reads as visibly foreign. For a Scottish public body publishing under a language plan, using Irish would also miss the point of the obligation entirely.

Because the vowels are doing a job that English gives to the consonants. Gaelic consonants come in two varieties, and which one is meant is signalled by the class of vowel written on either side of it, under the rule that slender vowels flank slender consonants and broad vowels flank broad ones. The extra vowels are therefore instructions rather than sounds in their own right. That is also why removing what looks like a redundant letter changes how the word is read.

Yes. Modern Gaelic uses the grave accent on à, è, ì, ò and ù to mark long vowels, and the length distinguishes words rather than merely adjusting pronunciation. Any workflow that flattens accented characters, whether an export to a restricted character set or a font that lacks the glyphs, quietly corrupts the text. Older printed material also uses acute accents, dropped when the orthographic conventions were settled in 1981, so archive scans can legitimately show both.

That is initial mutation. In many grammatical contexts the first consonant of a word is softened, which is written by inserting an h after it, so a noun can begin with two different letter sequences depending on where it stands in a sentence. This breaks alphabetical sorting, index generation and glossary matching, and it is worth knowing about if you are building a bilingual term list, because entries have to be stored under the base form rather than as they appear in running text.

Usually a little longer than the English, commonly in the range of a tenth to a fifth, with more expansion in short strings than in flowing prose. Headings, button labels and signage are the awkward cases, since a two-word English label can become a longer phrase with no shorter alternative available. Bilingual layouts should be designed with the Gaelic column given at least as much room as the English one.

Very rarely. Birth, marriage and death certificates, court records, land registers and school certificates in Scotland are issued in English, so if you need a Scottish document translated for use abroad, the source language is English rather than Gaelic. Gaelic source material tends to be cultural and community writing: oral history, place name studies, local publications and archive correspondence from the islands.

Names need attention rather than translation. Many Scottish place names are anglicised forms of Gaelic originals, and the Gaelic form is not always recoverable by rule, so a document that names locations should be checked against an authoritative list rather than left to automatic handling. Personal names likewise have established Gaelic forms that people may or may not use. Leave a proofreading pass for names specifically, since they are the errors readers notice first.