System and method for distributing multilingual documents

A method for converting a document from a first language into a second language comprising the steps of:

• receiving, via an electronic device, image data indicating a document, wherein said document, when rendered, comprises human-readable text written in a first language;
• said image data including language translation data encoded, via an encoding module, in binary machine-readable code embedded in said image data such that when said document is rendered, the encoded language translation data is both rendered on the document and is not human-readable;
• receiving selection data indicating a selected foreign language for translation of said human-readable text written in the first language;
• and
• producing, via a decoding module, a human-readable translation of said document in said selected foreign language using the encoded language translation data encoded in said machine-readable code, the encoded language translation data representing a correction code C that describes a set of editing functions E that are applied to the text, which is human readable text P, of the document having the first language, to convert the text P from the first language into the second language, wherein for each page of the text P in the first language, there is an accurate translation ATL into the second language L;
• wherein a processing routine RL, is applied to each page of the text P in the first language to produce the translation of the text P into the second language L, the quality of the translation RL(P) being on a continuum, the coded C computed in accordance with:
• ATL=E(C,RL(P))
• and the code C transmitted as glyphs on the page containing the text P,
• wherein multilingual encoding and decoding modules reconstruct the accurate translation ATL by optical character recognition processing of the text P, by application of the processing routine RL to the translation result, and then by correcting the translation result according to instructions of the code C,
• wherein a Machine Translation MT capability is used to produce the translation by the optical character recognition processing of the text of the document in the first language;
• and
• after applying the Machine Translation MT to the text P, the method performing at least one of the steps of:
• (i) C and E performing the additional processing to improve readability of the text P, wherein the code C contains the operations that the editing functions E perform to produce the ATL and/or (ii) performing disambiguation by framing a series of questions to a person fluent with the first language, and using by the translation software answers to the questions to make choices of word sense and sentence patterns in the second language, the code C recording the answers to the series of questions so the fluent person's knowledge is available for guidance when a translation is undertaken.