The best paper on your research topic was published in Mandarin. Or German. Or Portuguese. You can see the abstract in English on PubMed, but the full methodology, data tables, and discussion are locked behind a language barrier.
Waiting months for an official translation — or paying hundreds for a professional one — isn't practical when you need the information now. Here's how researchers are using ScanThisText to bridge the gap.
The Problem: 60% of Scientific Output Is Non-English
While English dominates high-impact journals, a massive portion of global research is published in Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, and Korean. Environmental science, traditional medicine, regional epidemiology, and local policy research are especially affected. If you only read English, you miss more than half the world's scientific output.
Scan → Extract → Translate in One Step
Most research papers are PDFs — often scanned, not searchable. Traditional translation tools can't read them. ScanThisText's pipeline handles the full workflow: OCR extracts every word from the scanned PDF (including tables, headers, and footnotes), then translates the entire document into your language.
Tables and Figures
Data tables in foreign-language papers are particularly painful. Column headers in Kanji, row labels in Cyrillic, footnotes in Arabic. ScanThisText preserves the structure during OCR — you get the translated headers alongside the numeric data, making the table immediately readable.
Citations and References
Scanning a paper's reference list and translating the titles helps you discover related work you'd never find through English-only search. Many breakthrough papers are cited only in their original language — translation unlocks the citation network.
Privacy for Unpublished Work
If you're translating a colleague's unpublished manuscript or grant proposal, privacy matters. ScanThisText processes documents with end-to-end encryption, auto-deletes files after processing, and never stores or trains on your content. Unlike free translation tools that may retain your text, ScanThisText treats research confidentiality seriously.
Get Started
Upload a PDF or photograph of any research paper to the Translator. The OCR handles multi-column layouts, footnotes, and even low-resolution scans. Free users get 5,000 characters per day — enough for several pages of dense academic text.