English to Malayalam, and Malayalam 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 Malayalam circular comes back as an English circular, and an English notice as a Malayalam 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 Malayalam is set in Noto Sans Malayalam, as real Unicode text you can search and edit; if that font is not on your computer, choose any Malayalam 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 Malayalam
In the test notice the fee came back as ഫീസ് 250: the figure was kept, as every figure is, but the word for rupees in front of it was not. The figure is protected; the currency word around it is ordinary text, and the machine left it out. Translated back into English it read “the fee is 250”. In a Malayalam translation, check that every amount still says what currency it is in.
The first sentence also ran the section and the year together, 24(2) വകുപ്പ് 2016 പ്രകാരം, where the English had the year beside the Act’s name. Both numbers are right; their places are worth a look.
What was measured for Malayalam
Before Malayalam was switched on, the production pipeline translated the test notice from English into Malayalam 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 Malayalam side was written in the Malayalam 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 Malayalam 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 Malayalam writer would put it.
Malayalam 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 Malayalam OCR, correct what needs correcting, and translate the Word file that comes out. Malayalam set in an old font such as ML-TT Karthika, Revathi or Akhila pastes as Latin letters; convert it to Unicode with the legacy converter first, then translate.
Footnotes, endnotes and comments are not translated yet, and the result says so. Text inside a picture is not translated. Malayalam OCR reads scans of printed Malayalam, and its Word file can be translated straight away.