Translate a PDF into Indonesian

What changes when a PDF goes into Indonesian

Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet with no accents or special characters. No font needs replacing to display it, so your document's original typeface can usually be kept, unlike a PDF translated into Chinese or Japanese.

The real issue is length. Indonesian builds words with prefixes and suffixes: accountability becomes pertanggungjawaban, to account for becomes mempertanggungjawabkan. These long words break badly and quickly fill a narrow column, a table cell or a brochure call-out. Headings grow too: Terms and Conditions is usually Syarat dan Ketentuan, and longer variants are common in formal documents.

Elsewhere the language is forgiving: no grammatical gender and no verb conjugation (tense is carried by words such as sudah or akan). Plurals are formed by reduplication with a hyphen, dokumen-dokumen, but the doubling is dropped after a number: 3 dokumen, never 3 dokumen-dokumen. A label like {n} attachments therefore has a single form in Indonesian.

Numbers, dates and register: Indonesian conventions

• Numbers: decimal comma and full stop for thousands, 1.250.000,50. A financial table left with English separators can be misread by an Indonesian reader, so check figures carefully.
• Currency: the rupiah is written Rp before the amount, Rp 1.500.000. Amounts in other currencies stay in that currency: translation does not convert them.
• Dates: day, month, year, with the month spelt out in running text, 17 Agustus 2025.
• Times: written style uses a full stop, 14.30 WIB, with the time zone (WIB, WITA or WIT) when the document covers several islands.
• Register: the polite Anda, always capitalised; in letters, the reader is addressed as Bapak or Ibu.

For contracts, Indonesia's Law No. 24 of 2009 requires Indonesian to be used in agreements involving an Indonesian party, so the Indonesian version carries legal weight and should be reviewed by a lawyer. For official procedures, authorities often ask for a translation by a penerjemah tersumpah (sworn translator): Manuce does not produce sworn or certified translations.

What Manuce delivers

Manuce reads the PDF text block by block, with its position, font, size and colour. The original text is erased and the Indonesian translation placed in the same box, using the original font or an equivalent; images and background stay where they were. Because Indonesian is written in Latin script, the re-laid PDF is produced, which is not the case for Thai, Indian scripts or right-to-left languages.

When a translation runs longer than the original, the text size is reduced until it fits its box. With words like pertanggungjawaban, this shows mostly in headings, table cells and captions.

You receive four files:

• the PDF in its original layout, text replaced in place;
• a Word version with editable text;
• a formatted PDF;
• plain text.

What Manuce does not do: read a scanned PDF (a page image with no selectable text), or produce a sworn translation. Indonesian carries a surcharge, a ×1.25 coefficient on the per-word rate, already included in the quote shown when you upload.

Preparing the PDF and checking the result

Before uploading:

• Try selecting a sentence with your mouse. If nothing highlights, the page is an image: go back to the source file exported from your word processor or layout software.
• Prefer a directly exported PDF to one that has been printed to PDF several times, where text is sometimes split letter by letter.
• Note what must stay unchanged: brand names, product codes, and company abbreviations such as PT or Tbk in Indonesian company names. Check how they are handled in the free sample, then in the delivered translation.

After delivery:

• Look through tables and boxes where text was shrunk; if a cell becomes hard to read, adjust it in the Word version.
• Check that numbers follow Indonesian notation and that amounts have not changed.
• Make sure no word is broken mid-affix at a line end; a split at the reduplication hyphen (buku- / buku) remains readable.
• Confirm that Anda keeps its capital letter throughout, including mid-sentence.

In practice

1. Check that the text in your PDF can be selected.
2. Upload the file and choose Indonesian: the quote appears, based on the exact word count.
3. Read the free sample, paying attention to terms that must stay unchanged.
4. Pay and download the re-laid PDF, the Word version, the formatted PDF and plain text.
5. Review tables, figures and long headings, and edit in Word if needed.