Translate PDF to Yiddish

That is the closest one line description and it is still wrong in important ways. The grammar and core vocabulary are Germanic and a German speaker recognises a great deal, but Yiddish carries a large Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, a substantial Slavic layer, and grammatical patterns of its own that developed over a thousand years of separate history. Treating it as German with a different alphabet produces translations that miss most of the words that matter.

The standard associated with the YIVO Institute, which is what dictionaries, language courses, academic publishing and most secular literature follow, and what translation systems are trained on. The Hasidic press uses different conventions, often omits the diacritical marks and spells a number of common words differently, and it produces the largest volume of new Yiddish being written today. If your readers are in a Hasidic community, that is a request for a translator from that community.

It writes them, which is one of the most useful differences between the two. Hebrew normally omits short vowels and relies on the reader; Yiddish assigns vowel values to alef, ayin, vov and yud so that the text is fully readable as written. The practical consequence is that Yiddish is easier to read aloud than unpointed Hebrew, and that a font has to support a rather different set of letter and mark combinations than a Hebrew only font provides.

Because the language runs two spelling systems at the same time. Words of Germanic and Slavic origin are spelled phonetically, letter by sound. Words that came in from Hebrew and Aramaic keep their traditional Hebrew spelling instead, which often bears little relation to the Yiddish pronunciation. A reader has to know which layer a word belongs to, and so does any tool processing the text, which is one of the genuinely unusual demands this language makes.

Almost certainly the digraphs. Yiddish uses two vovs, a vov with a yud, and two yuds, and each can be encoded either as one precomposed character or as two separate letters in sequence. The two encodings look identical on the page and are different to a computer, so a search for one form finds nothing written in the other, and an index of names silently splits in two. Normalising the text to a single form before indexing or searching solves it.

Sometimes, and with less accuracy than for modern print. Pre war Yiddish typography used a range of typefaces including a semi cursive style that automated reading handles poorly, and archival paper is usually browned with uneven ink. A clean scan of a well printed page can give a usable draft; a faded newspaper column may not. For genealogical work the practical approach is to use machine output to locate the passages that matter and have a specialist read those closely.

Handwriting is beyond what automated reading can do here. Yiddish cursive differs from print substantially, individual hands vary enormously, and the letters and diaries people most want translated are the ones written quickly by ordinary people. Those need a human reader who works with the period and the region. A typed or printed document is a different matter and is usually workable.

No. Claims involving property, restitution or an estate turn on names, dates, place names and precise wording, all of which are exactly what an automated reading of an old document gets wrong. Use the machine version to understand what a document is and whether it is relevant, then have a certified translation prepared by a translator who works with material of that period for anything you actually file.