ChatGPT and Claude lose PDF layout when translating in chat

On 11 November 2026, the Equalang team published a piece on DEV Community examining whether ChatGPT or Claude can translate a PDF while keeping its original layout. According to the article, uploading a PDF straight into an AI chat window and asking for a full translation does not return a clean, well-matched document. What comes back is instead a wall of plain text. If the document runs to many pages, the response can stop midway or summarize the later sections, leaving the reader with only part of the content. Tables turn into messy columns of text, figures and footnotes vanish, and mathematical formulas frequently arrive as broken strings. The Equalang team attributes this behavior to the way chat interfaces work: they extract text along the conversation stream rather than reconstructing the document's layout, which means the translated output is detached from the structure of the source file. For that reason, the article argues, document translation needs a dedicated workflow built around PDF structure rather than a plain chat prompt. One caveat readers should keep in mind is that the authors disclose they are the makers of the tool used in the guide, so the piece has a promotional interest attached to it. No response from OpenAI or Anthropic on this description was included in the material reviewed here, and no other independent coverage of the issue was available at the time of writing.