BabelDOC: Better Layout-Preserving PDF Translation via Intermediate Representation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10845v1
• Date: Mon, 11 May 2026 16:56:44 GMT
• Title: BabelDOC: Better Layout-Preserving PDF Translation via Intermediate Representation
• Abstract summary: Existing document translation pipelines face a tension between linguistic processing and layout preservation.<n>We introduce BabelDOC, an Intermediate Representation (IR)-based framework for layout-preserving PDF translation.<n>BabelDOC decouples visual layout metadata from semantic content, enabling document-level translation operations.
• Score: 9.979324579114392
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: As global cross-lingual communication intensifies, language barriers in visually rich documents such as PDFs remain a practical bottleneck. Existing document translation pipelines face a tension between linguistic processing and layout preservation: text-oriented Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) systems often discard structural metadata, while document parsers focus on extraction and do not support faithful re-rendering after translation. We introduce BabelDOC, an Intermediate Representation (IR)-based framework for layout-preserving PDF translation. BabelDOC decouples visual layout metadata from semantic content, enabling document-level translation operations such as terminology extraction, cross-page context handling, glossary-constrained generation, and formula placeholdering. The translated content is then re-anchored to the original layout through an adaptive typesetting engine. Experiments on a curated 200-page benchmark, together with human evaluation and multimodal LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, show that BabelDOC improves layout fidelity, visual aesthetics, and terminology consistency over representative baselines, while maintaining competitive translation precision. The open-source toolkit and its interactive downstream applications are publicly available and have attracted over 8.4K GitHub stars and 17 contributors at the time of writing. A demonstration video is also available.

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