Translating a document
Translation here is built for length. On a paragraph any translator will do; the difference shows up at three hundred pages, where the same term has to come out the same way every time.
Before you start
The document open in MindMax. If it is a scan, recognise it first and check the per-page report — recognition quality is the ceiling for everything downstream.
Step 1: start it and read the brief
Choose Translate in the reader's AI menu, or ask the assistant to translate the document into a language. Before translating anything, MindMax reads the document and works out what it is — subject, register, audience — then proposes a glossary of the terms that will recur.
Step 2: correct the glossary
This is the step that matters. Correcting one term here propagates through the whole document. Correcting it in chapter nine means going back through eight chapters.
If your folder already contains translations that settled on a rendering for a term, that choice is carried forward. Accept or override it here.
Twenty minutes on the glossary is the best-spent time in the whole job. Skimming it means inheriting its mistakes for three hundred pages.
Step 3: let it run
Each chapter is translated against the same glossary. Sections that fail the mechanical checks — dropped content, numbers that changed, terms that broke the glossary — are sent back for another pass automatically.
Progress is checkpointed. You can pause it from the task card; closing the app mid-job resumes rather than restarts.
Step 4: read chapter one against the original
The translation sits beside the source, aligned. Judge it now, before the whole book is done. If the register is wrong, the brief or the glossary is where you fix it — not the output.
Step 5: polish
Ask for a chapter to be tightened or its register adjusted. The change arrives as a tracked edit you accept or reject, the same as anywhere else in the editor.
Where the output goes
Markdown (or, for a PowerPoint deck, a new .pptx — see below) in a translations folder that
mirrors where the original sits — papers/report.pdf
translated into English becomes translations/papers/report.en.md. Translating the same document
again creates a new file rather than overwriting the first. You can annotate the translation,
quote it and link to it like anything else, and Translations in the reader lists every
version of a document.
PowerPoint decks keep their layout
A .pptx is translated into another .pptx, not into Markdown: talks/launch.pptx translated
into Chinese becomes translations/talks/launch.zh.pptx. Only the words are replaced — themes,
colours, images, shapes and the position of every text box stay as they were — and the speaker
notes are translated too. Each slide is translated as one piece, so the model sees the whole
slide at once, with the same brief and glossary as any other document.
Translated text is often longer than the original. Where it would spill out of its box, the font in that box is shrunk, but not below 70% of its size; anything that still will not fit is listed when the job finishes, slide by slide. Translations in the reader opens the two decks side by side, with a filter for the slides that may overflow — check those before you present.
What it will not catch
The verification pass finds mechanical failures. It cannot tell you that a sentence is technically correct and completely wrong in tone. That judgement is why step 4 exists.
Terminology consistency is also the wrong instrument for text that depends on ambiguity — poetry, wordplay and legal drafting.