A computer-implemented method, a computer system and a computer program product enhance machine translation of a document. The method includes capturing an image of the document. The document includes a plurality of characters that are arranged in a character layout. The method also includes classifying the image by a document type based on the character layout. The method further includes determining a strategy for an intelligent character recognition (ICR) algorithm with the image based on the character layout of the image. Lastly, the method includes generating a translated document by applying the intelligent character recognition (ICR) algorithm to the plurality of characters in the image using the strategy. The translated document includes a plurality of translated characters that are arranged in the character layout.