With the growing adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in document processing, robust text recognition has become increasingly critical for knowledge extraction. While OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for English and other languages benefits from large datasets and well-established benchmarks, Arabic OCR faces unique challenges due to its cursive script, right-to-left text flow, and complex typographic and calligraphic features. We present KITAB-Bench, a comprehensive Arabic OCR benchmark that fills the gaps in current evaluation systems. Our benchmark comprises 8,809 samples across 9 major domains and 36 sub-domains, encompassing diverse document types including handwritten text, structured tables, and specialized coverage of 21 chart types for business intelligence. Our findings show that modern vision-language models (such as GPT-4, Gemini, and Qwen) outperform traditional OCR approaches (like EasyOCR, PaddleOCR, and Surya) by an average of 60% in Character Error Rate (CER). Furthermore, we highlight significant limitations of current Arabic OCR models, particularly in PDF-to-Markdown conversion, where the best model Gemini-2.0-Flash achieves only 65% accuracy. This underscores the challenges in accurately recognizing Arabic text, including issues with complex fonts, numeral recognition errors, word elongation, and table structure detection. This work establishes a rigorous evaluation framework that can drive improvements in Arabic document analysis methods and bridge the performance gap with English OCR technologies.

Google Translate has been prominent for language translation; however, limited work has been done in evaluating the quality of translation when compared to human experts. Sanskrit one of the oldest written languages in the world. In 2022, the Sanskrit language was added to the Google Translate engine. Sanskrit is known as the mother of languages such as Hindi and an ancient source of the Indo-European group of languages. Sanskrit is the original language for sacred Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita. In this study, we present a framework that evaluates the Google Translate for Sanskrit using the Bhagavad Gita. We first publish a translation of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit using Google Translate. Our framework then compares Google Translate version of Bhagavad Gita with expert translations using sentiment and semantic analysis via BERT-based language models. Our results indicate that in terms of sentiment and semantic analysis, there is low level of similarity in selected verses of Google Translate when compared to expert translations. In the qualitative evaluation, we find that Google translate is unsuitable for translation of certain Sanskrit words and phrases due to its poetic nature, contextual significance, metaphor and imagery. The mistranslations are not surprising since the Bhagavad Gita is known as a difficult text not only to translate, but also to interpret since it relies on contextual, philosophical and historical information. Our framework lays the foundation for automatic evaluation of other languages by Google Translate