English to Punjabi, and Punjabi 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 Punjabi circular comes back as an English circular, and an English notice as a Punjabi 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 Punjabi is set in Noto Sans Gurmukhi, as real Unicode text you can search and edit; if that font is not on your computer, choose any Punjabi 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 Punjabi
Punjabi here means Gurmukhi. The tool writes and reads Punjabi in Gurmukhi only; a document in Shahmukhi, the Perso-Arabic script used for Punjabi in Pakistan, is not a pair it offers.
As in Gujarati, the Act’s name came back spelled out in Gurmukhi letters, ਹਾਊਸਿੰਗ ਐਕਟ, not given a Punjabi name. That is common in Punjabi writing, but an official document may have an official name for it. The punctuation is Punjabi’s own: the full stop became the danda, ।, and a contraction such as ’ਤੇ kept its apostrophe.
What was measured for Punjabi
Before Punjabi was switched on, the production pipeline translated the test notice from English into Punjabi 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 Punjabi side was written in the Gurmukhi 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 Punjabi 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 Punjabi writer would put it.
Punjabi 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 Punjabi OCR, correct what needs correcting, and translate the Word file that comes out. Punjabi set in an old Gurmukhi font such as Asees 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. Punjabi OCR reads scans of printed Gurmukhi, and its Word file can be translated straight away.