Book translation — your English book, into twenty-four languages
Your book, eight times.
You wrote it once. Somewhere between forty and four hundred million people would read it and can't.
We make the editions that fix that — translated by a system built for book-length work, finished by a named human editor, delivered as files you own outright. Two chapters and a full translation brief, free, in 24 hours. We’ll sign your NDA first.
3.5M
new self-published titles in the US last year
<5%
of Amazon titles exist in more than one language
$11.3B
German book market, 4th largest on earth
+11.2%
Brazilian trade revenue growth
Sources: Bowker, Amazon, Börsenverein, NielsenIQ. We show our working on the quality page.
A literary translator costs $14,000 and takes eight months.
So nobody ever finds out whether the book would have worked in German. The manuscript stays in one language, and the other twenty-three markets never get the chance to say no.
- The literary route
- $14,000
- one language, eight months
- Reviewed edition
- $549
- one language, five to eight days
- Publication edition
- $3,900
- one language, three to five weeks
What’s on the other side of the language.
Enter what the book earns now. We’ll model what a second edition is worth, and how long it takes to pay for itself.
A planning model, not a forecast. It takes what your book earns at home and applies a modeled 24-month share for each market, adjusted for how that genre travels. Treat the range as the question worth answering, not the answer.
$40,000
Selected editions, combined
$10,080 – $24,000
Against a one-off cost of $1,647 at the Reviewed tier.
| Market | Readers | Competition | First 24 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| DEGermanEurope's largest book market, fourth largest on earth at roughly $11.3B. Fixed-price law doesn't apply to indie ebooks or POD, so you price freely against traditional publishers. Crime and mystery is the biggest segment in the country. | 95M | Low | $4,800 – $11,520 |
| ESSpanishSpain plus Latin America in one edition. Lower price points, enormous readership, and Mexico grew 7% in the last full year of trade data. | 490M | Moderate | $3,360 – $7,680 |
| FRFrenchConservative buyers, strong print culture, and readerships that stay with a series for its whole run. | 80M | Moderate | $2,880 – $6,720 |
| BRPortuguese (Brazil)Brazilian trade revenue grew 11.2% while the US grew about 1%. Bookstagram and BookTok are unusually strong sales channels there. | 210M | Low | $2,400 – $6,240 |
| ITItalianCrime fiction over-indexes dramatically. A thriller that does modest numbers in English can chart in Italy. | 65M | Low | $2,400 – $5,760 |
| PLPolishNo free machine route into this market. Fantasy and science fiction punch far above the market size. | 40M | Very low | $1,920 – $4,800 |
Shares are planning ranges built from trade market size and observed translated-edition sell-through. They are not a promise, and a book that underperforms at home usually underperforms abroad too.
Sometimes the translation outsells the original.
This is not a marketing line. It’s the ordinary consequence of arithmetic.
Three and a half million self-published titles came out in the US last year, a 38.7% jump in twelve months. Every one of them is competing for the same categories, the same ads, the same readers. Meanwhile fewer than one Amazon title in twenty exists in a second language — so the German thriller chart, the Italian mystery chart and the Polish fantasy chart are being fought over by a fraction of the field.
The indie author David Penny translated ten historical thrillers into German. He has written publicly that Germany became his best sales channel by far, with nine of those titles holding top-100 chart positions for over a year.
Published account, Alliance of Independent Authors. Not a client of ours.
He is not unusual. He was just early.
The same book. A market where almost nobody showed up.
Your book, drawn as territory.
Every coloured country is a market we translate into. Hover or tap one to see the readership, the competition, and whether it’s open today.
German
- Readers
- 95M
- Competition
- Low
- Second-edition lift
- 10–24%
- Status
- Open
Europe's largest book market, fourth largest on earth at roughly $11.3B. Fixed-price law doesn't apply to indie ebooks or POD, so you price freely against traditional publishers. Crime and mystery is the biggest segment in the country.
- Open
- Opening
- Waitlist
Twenty-four languages. Seven you can buy today.
We open a language when we have an editor for it and a sample we’d put our name on. Not before. The rest are honest about where they stand.
Read it against the original.
We pick dialogue on purpose. Dialogue is where machine translation gives itself away, so it’s the only fair place to judge this.
She had not spoken to her brother in eleven years, and the first thing he said to her was that the house was already sold.
Sie hatte elf Jahre lang nicht mit ihrem Bruder gesprochen, und das Erste, was er zu ihr sagte, war, dass das Haus bereits verkauft sei.
Subjunctive sei rather than war. It marks the sentence as his claim rather than established fact — the doubt the English carries through context, German carries through mood.
"You could have called," she said. Not an accusation. A door, left open a crack.
„Du hättest anrufen können“, sagte sie. Kein Vorwurf. Eine Tür, einen Spalt offen gelassen.
A book is not a long document.
It has a voice that has to hold for three hundred pages, and a hundred small decisions that are wrong the moment they’re inconsistent.
- 01
Read
Before a word is translated, the whole manuscript is read for a book bible: every character, invented term, place name, motif, and the address matrix that governs how characters speak to each other.
- 02
Draft
The book is translated in scene-length passes, each one carrying the bible plus the preceding source and the preceding translation. That backward context is what keeps a voice continuous across three hundred pages.
- 03
Revise
A separate pass reads source and translation side by side and rewrites for register drift, glossary breaks and calque — the sentences that are accurate and still sound translated.
- 04
Check
Deterministic checks, not opinions: expansion ratio per scene, glossary violations, untranslated fragments, numbers and dates, collapsed paragraphs, and back-translation divergence on a sample.
- 05
Edit
A named human editor who works in that language resolves every flag, and in the Publication tier reads and edits the entire manuscript line by line.
Nobody’s book ships without a name on it.
Paid at or above their association’s published rates. Credited on the title page. In the Publication tier, they read every line.
- EN → DE
Editor name
MA literary translation, Leipzig. Eleven published translations in crime and thriller.
- EN → DE
Editor name
Fifteen years in-house at a Hamburg trade imprint. Genre fiction and narrative nonfiction.
- EN → PL
Editor name
Jagiellonian University. Fantasy and science fiction specialist, six published novels.
- EN → PL
Editor name
Freelance for two Warsaw trade houses. Romance and commercial fiction.
- ES / PT → EN
Editor name
US-based line editor. Two hundred-plus full-length manuscripts for trade and indie authors.
The six questions we always get.
- Is my manuscript used to train anything?
- No. Not by us, not by any model provider we use. Files are encrypted, visible only to your assigned editor, and deleted on request. We'll sign your NDA before upload.
- Who owns the translation?
- You do, outright, on delivery. No royalty claim, no territory restriction, no requirement to publish through anyone.
- Do I have to disclose how it was made?
- In some markets, yes — and we hand you a provenance record built for that. We also state it plainly on the copyright page by default.
- Is this as good as a literary translator?
- For a prize-list literary novel, no, and we'll say so before taking your money. For commercial fiction and narrative nonfiction, read the passage above and decide.
- Do I control the translation rights?
- Check your contract before you order. If a publisher holds foreign rights, you can't commission this. We ask at intake rather than after delivery.
- What if the sample isn't good?
- Then don't buy. That's the entire reason the sample is free and the reason we pick a dialogue-heavy chapter rather than an easy one.
Two tiers, both published.
Reviewed
$549 per language
The edition most books should publish in.
- —Full four-pass translation with book bible
- —Native-speaker editor reviews a 10,000-word sample
- —Every flagged passage resolved by that editor
- —EPUB, DOCX and print-ready PDF
- —Translation brief and provenance record
Delivery 5–8 days
Publication
$3,900 per language
When the edition carries your imprint.
- —Everything in Reviewed
- —Full line-by-line post-edit of the whole manuscript
- —Editor named and credited on the title page
- —Second reader pass for voice and continuity
- —Localised metadata, blurb and keywords
Delivery 3–5 weeks
Send a chapter. Find out for free.
Worst case, you learn your book doesn’t travel — which is worth knowing before you spend anything.