Seek Hub — Document Translation Platform
A document-translation prototype built to preserve the structure of PDFs and editable files while processing their text with language models.
Technologies Used
Seek Hub — Document Translation Platform
Table of Contents
Why I built it
Seek Hub was my first serious attempt to turn a technical idea into a product. I kept running into the same problem with document translation: the words could be translated, but tables, images, headings, and page structure often came back damaged. Fixing the output by hand defeated much of the point.
I wanted to treat formatting as part of the document, not as an afterthought. The goal was a workflow where someone could upload a file, review the translated content, and download an editable result without rebuilding the document from scratch.
What I built
The prototype accepts PDF and office-document uploads, extracts text together with layout information, translates the content in smaller units, and then reconstructs the result. The interface also leaves room for reviewing alternative wording before export.
The main workflow is deliberately short:
- Upload a document.
- Extract its text and structural information.
- Translate independent sections concurrently.
- Reassemble the translated sections into a downloadable file.
How it works
The web application uses Next.js on the frontend and a Python service for document processing. Firebase handles application data and file-transfer state. On the backend, a task pipeline divides large documents into smaller jobs so translation requests can run concurrently instead of blocking one long request.
The hardest part was not calling a language model. It was deciding where text could safely be split, keeping the segments in order, and placing them back into a layout that may contain tables, images, and mixed styles. I built the conversion layer around that problem and treated translation quality and layout fidelity as separate things that both needed to be checked.
What I learned
This project made product engineering feel much more concrete. I had to think about failed uploads, cloud permissions, long-running jobs, file cleanup, and the difference between a convincing demo and a reliable service. It also taught me to be careful with promises: document layouts vary enormously, so preservation is an engineering target rather than something I describe as perfect.
Seek Hub remains a private, evolving project, so there is no public source repository at the moment.