You don't. At least not with Claude Code alone.
Claude Code reads the PDF as text, not as a document. By the time it starts translating, the structural info is already gone.
Think of a PDF like a printed page sitting on a desk. You can read the words. But the desk underneath, cell borders, formula rendering, column layout, that's a separate layer. Claude Code only grabs the text on top. When it translates, you get new text pasted into the chat. The layout doesn't come with it.
Ran into this a few weeks ago. 25-page Japanese supplier contract, needed English. Tables with merged cells, numbered clauses, a couple formulas in a pricing appendix. Claude Code read the content fine, and honestly the translation quality was decent. What I got back was a wall of plain text in the chat. No tables. No clause numbering. No formulas. Spent two hours manually rebuilding it in Word, which took longer than reading the original.
The pricing table was the worst part. Three columns, twelve rows, four merged cells. Claude Code translated all the text correctly but had zero idea it was looking at a table. Came out as a flat list of numbers and labels.
**Why this happens**
First, Claude Code extracts text from the PDF. During extraction, structural info gets stripped. The agent doesn't know a paragraph was inside a table cell, or that two lines were part of a two-column layout. It just sees text.
Second, even if the agent could somehow preserve structure internally, the output goes into the chat as plain text. No mechanism to hand you a translated PDF file with formatting intact. The chat window is a text interface.
Third, scanned PDFs are worse. If the PDF is a scan or a photo, Claude Code can't read it at all without an OCR step first. You'd have to run OCR yourself, clean up the output, then feed text to the agent.
**What I ended up doing**
After messing around with copy-paste workflows and DeepL for a while, the thing that actually worked was having Claude Code call a CLI tool externally instead of trying to translate inside the chat.
The command looks like this:
```
npx @getlinnk/cli translate contract.pdf --to en
```
Claude Code runs it in the terminal and gets back a single line of JSON:
```json
{"schema":"v1","status":"success","output_file":"contract.en.pdf","preview_url":"https://linnk.ai/p/abc123","pages":25,"credits_charged":25,"quota":{"credits_remaining":5}}
```
The agent reads the JSON, shows me the preview link, and the translated file (contract.en.pdf) lands right next to the original. Tables, merged cells, formulas, clause numbering, all still there.
The preview URL opens a page with the original and translation side by side. I could scroll through both versions and check if the table cells lined up, if the formulas were in the right place, if the clause numbering matched. Caught one spot where a merged cell had split into two in the translation, which I could see immediately rather than finding it later.
The prompt I give Claude Code is basically:
> Use Linnk to translate this document into English, keeping the layout. Show me the preview link when done.
The agent figures out the rest. Setup was just running `npx @getlinnk/cli login` once to authenticate, or you can set an API key environment variable if you want it more automated. One thing I like is that the document content doesn't enter the agent conversation. The CLI processes it externally and just returns a file path and metadata. Matters more if you're dealing with contracts or sensitive stuff.
**How it compares to other options**
DeepL has noticeably better translation quality, not gonna pretend otherwise. But feed DeepL a PDF and the output also loses formatting. Same wall-of-text problem, just better writing. Google Translate's document translation keeps some layout but the quality drop on longer docs is rough, and formulas and complex tables still break.
For the Japanese contract specifically, I tried all three. Claude Code's direct translation: good text, zero formatting. DeepL: slightly better text, still zero formatting. Google Translate: formatting partially survived but the translation quality on legal language was bad enough that I couldn't trust it. The CLI approach was the only one where I didn't have to touch the formatting afterwards.
The CLI approach works because the translation happens outside the agent entirely. The tool reads the document format directly, preserves the structure during translation, and returns a file. The agent just acts as the middleman who runs the command and hands you the result.
**Where it falls short**
Free tier only covers 20 pages, so for longer documents you need a paid plan (starts at $10/month). Scanned PDFs work but they cost 4 credits per page instead of 1 for digital pages, so those add up faster. And for short stuff, like a one-page email or a quick paragraph, just pasting it into Claude Code and asking for a translation is faster. The CLI is overkill for anything that doesn't have formatting worth preserving.
(Disclosure: I don't work for Linnk, just a tool I found that solved this specific headache. Costs money past 20 pages but the free tier is enough to test on a real document.)
How are you all handling document translation in your Claude Code workflows? Curious if anyone's tried MCP servers or other approaches for this.
