Translate a PDF into Hungarian and keep the original layout

What changes when a PDF goes into Hungarian

Hungarian is agglutinative: where English strings several words together, Hungarian often fuses them into one. "Health insurance certificate" becomes egészségbiztosítási igazolás, and a short column heading can turn into a single word of twenty letters or so. In a PDF every text box has a fixed width, so this is where Hungarian shows first.

• Long words: in a table cell, a caption or a drawn button, one Hungarian word can fill the whole width, with no space at which to break the line.
• Double acute accents: ő and ű are letters in their own right, distinct from ö and ü. They are often wrongly replaced by õ and û, which belong to other languages. Szerződés (contract) written as "szerzõdés" is an error any Hungarian reader will spot.
• Name order: the family name comes first. "Anna Kovács" is written Kovács Anna in a letterhead, a signature block or a list of attendees.
• Local conventions: dates as 2024. 03. 15. or 2024. március 15., a decimal comma with a space for thousands (1 250,50), quotation marks „like this”, and addresses with the postcode before the city: 1052 Budapest, Váci utca 12.

What Manuce delivers, and what it does not do

Manuce reads the PDF's text block by block, together with its position, font, size and colour. The original text is removed and the Hungarian translation is placed in the same box, in the original font or an equivalent. Images and page backgrounds stay where they are. When the translation is longer than the source, which is common with Hungarian compounds, the text size is reduced until it fits its box.

You receive four files:

• the PDF in its original layout, with the text replaced in place (layout work is included in the price);
• a Word version with editable text, handy for reworking a cramped area;
• a formatted PDF for continuous reading;
• the plain text.

What Manuce does not do:

• Scanned PDFs are not read. A photographed or scanned page is just an image: you need a PDF whose text can be selected.
• No sworn or certified translation. For a birth certificate, diploma or court document going to a Hungarian authority, a certified translation is usually required; check with the receiving body. A Manuce translation is suited to understanding a document or sharing it in a business setting.

Because Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet, written left to right, the re-laid-out PDF is produced, unlike right-to-left scripts.

Register, plurals and capitals: what a Hungarian reader notices

A few rules of written Hungarian can be checked at a glance in the translated PDF:

• Formal address: business or official documents address the reader as Ön (the polite form), not te. A consumer leaflet may use the informal form, but the choice must be consistent from page to page.
• Singular after a number: Hungarian says 3 oldal (literally "3 page") and 5 termék ("5 product"), never "3 oldalak". Plural is not marked after a numeral or a word such as sok (many).
• Capitalisation: in headings only the first word takes a capital, so English-style Title Case looks wrong. Months, weekdays and nationality adjectives are lower case: március, hétfő, angol.
• Acronyms and brand names: they take case endings joined by a hyphen, for example a PDF-ben (in the PDF). A product name stays recognisable but does not stay frozen as it would in English.

Preparing the PDF and checking the result

Before uploading:

• Check that the text is selectable: search for a word with your PDF reader's search function. If nothing is found, go back to the source file (word processor or layout software) and export a fresh PDF.
• Note the narrow areas: tightly spaced tables, footers, labelled diagrams. These are where the longest Hungarian words will land.

After the free sample, and again on the full translation:

• Check that brand names, product codes and any terms meant to stay unchanged have been left intact.
• Search the delivered PDF for "õ" and "û": there should be none. Also check that ő and ű display in the same font as the rest of the word.
• Look through the tables: if text has been shrunk too far to read comfortably, rework that area in the Word version.
• Check the family-name-first order in signatures and lists of people, according to what your readers expect.

In practice

1. Make sure the text in your PDF can be selected.
2. Upload the file and choose Hungarian: the quote appears, based on the exact word count.
3. Read the free sample, paying attention to terms to keep and to the ő and ű accents.
4. Pay, then download the re-laid-out PDF, the Word version, the formatted PDF and the plain text.
5. Review tables and narrow areas, and adjust in the Word version if needed.