English to Kannada, and Kannada to English
Both directions work the same way. A Word file is edited where it stands: every paragraph style, table, list, header, footer and page setting stays the file’s own and only the words change, so a Kannada circular comes back as an English circular, and an English notice as a Kannada one, with its centred heading, numbered list and bordered table where they were. A PDF with selectable text is first turned into a Word file and then translated, so the result is a Word file you can edit, and how closely it follows the PDF is the PDF-to-Word conversion’s doing.
Translated Kannada is set in Noto Sans Kannada, as real Unicode text you can search and edit; if that font is not on your computer, choose any Kannada font in Word. Numbers, dates, section references, amounts, times of day, e-mail addresses and web addresses are taken out before a sentence is sent and put back afterwards, and an answer in which one does not come back exactly once is not accepted. A sentence that still cannot be translated stays in the source language and is highlighted yellow; it is never dropped, and never filled in with a guess.
What to read carefully in the Kannada
In the test notice the year of the Act came back at the end of the first sentence, after the verb: ಆಹ್ವಾನಿಸಲಾಗಿದೆ, 2016. Nothing was lost, and the year is still 2016, but it no longer sits beside the Act’s name, and a reader could take it for the date of the notice. Kannada puts the verb last, and a number that belongs to a name can drift with it. Check that each year and number still belongs to the word it belonged to in the English.
Translated back into English the sentence read correctly, which is why a back-translation alone is not a check: it can repair what the Kannada got wrong.
What was measured for Kannada
Before Kannada was switched on, the production pipeline translated the test notice from English into Kannada and back. In both directions 6 of 6 protected items came back exactly: the section reference, the year, the date, the amount, the e-mail address and the web address. The Kannada side was written in the Kannada script, and the English read back close to the original. A Word notice with a heading, a centred line with a bold date, a numbered list, a table, a tab, a header and a footer was also translated into Kannada and back, and its paragraph settings, table grid, page setup, header and footer were identical to the source, on the same number of pages.
That is a check of the machinery, not of the language. It says the tool kept your numbers and your layout; it does not say every sentence reads the way a Kannada writer would put it.
Kannada in a scan or an old font
A scanned PDF has no text to translate, so it is refused rather than guessed at. Read it first with Kannada OCR, correct what needs correcting, and translate the Word file that comes out. Kannada set in Nudi pastes as Latin letters; convert it to Unicode with the legacy converter first, then translate the result.
Footnotes, endnotes and comments are not translated yet, and the result says so. Text inside a picture is not translated. Kannada OCR reads scans of printed Kannada, and its Word file can be translated straight away.