PDF Viewer Context Menu (right click menu)
When reading heavy texts I often look up definitions on my Mac using the Mac's context menu look up/define feature. In Zotero this seems to work fine on my iOS devices however not on the OSX built-in pdf viewer. For a reading app it is essential to enable access to such feature as the current menu is extremely limited (see here https://ibb.co/0Yv6gk2) and is not integrated with essential built in features in mac's text context menu.
First, that's obviously primarily a problem with the OCR in the PDF, and it will affect any function that needs to extract text from the PDF, such as highlighting. You should test copying from the PDF from various PDF readers, and if it's a general problem, you should report it to whoever produced the PDF or (if you OCRed it) try different OCR software. If it's specific to Zotero, email the PDF to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread and we can see if there's anything to do to improve the parsing.
For the actual issue in this thread, even without a context menu you should be able to just select the word in question and press Cmd-Ctrl-D to run lookup on just the selected text. That's just not currently working in the Zotero PDF reader. (E.g., highlight the concatenated "improvement" in your comment above in Firefox or Safari and it will look up "improvement". It doesn't work in Chrome for some reason, but the Firefox behavior is what's relevant technically for Zotero.) We'll see if we can fix that.
For translation, we can't vouch for it, but there's a plugin for the PDF reader that hooks into Google Translate.
You are right that this string of words does not come up with all the PDFs I have, but on those OCRed by Wondershare PDFelement (which is now my default tool for OCR).
I tried some more files that were OCRed by someone else and noted that the issue comes up at the end of the line. So what I am thinking that maybe the matter is the definition of a word-separater? I don't know. I am sending the files to the support address.
I was not aware of the plugin. Just installed it and works fine! Interestingly, the words in the it captures and translates is orderly separated and the "stringing" issue does not occur here.