@inproceedings{qi-etal-2026-babeldoc,
    title = "{B}abel{DOC}: Better Layout-Preserving {PDF} Translation via Intermediate Representation",
    author = "Qi, Yang  and
      Ma, Xiangyao  and
      Wang, Xiao  and
      Wang, Hao  and
      Wang, Rui",
    editor = "Durrett, Greg  and
      Jian, Ping",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-demo.25/",
    pages = "253--262",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-392-0",
    abstract = "As global cross-lingual communication intensifies, language barriers in visually rich documents such as PDFs remain a practical bottleneck. Existing document translation pipelines face a tension between linguistic processing and layout preservation: text-oriented Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) systems often discard structural metadata, while document parsers focus on extraction and do not support faithful re-rendering after translation. We introduce BabelDOC, an Intermediate Representation (IR)-based framework for layout-preserving PDF translation. BabelDOC decouples visual layout metadata from semantic content, enabling document-level translation operations such as terminology extraction, cross-page context handling, glossary-constrained generation, and formula placeholdering. The translated content is then re-anchored to the original layout through an adaptive typesetting engine. Experiments on a curated 200-page benchmark, together with human evaluation and multimodal LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, show that BabelDOC improves layout fidelity, visual aesthetics, and terminology consistency over representative baselines, while maintaining competitive translation precision. The open-source toolkit and its interactive downstream applications have garnered over 7.8k stars on GitHub https://github.com/funstory-ai/BabelDOC. A demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/chwrlApH7a4."
}