A book is not a long document.
Machine translation is good at sentences and bad at books. Everything below exists to close that gap: continuity of voice, consistency of terminology, and a human who is accountable for the result by name.
- Pass 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.
- Pass 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.
- Pass 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.
- Pass 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.
- Pass 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.
The books we turn away.
Every translation service claims it can do everything. Ours cannot, and the cases below are where we say no or quote differently. You should trust the sample more than this page, but you should read this page.
Poetry and verse
We decline it. Metre and sound cannot be rebuilt by this process, and pretending otherwise would waste your money.
Prize-list literary fiction
A book whose sentences are the event needs a literary translator with a name and eight months. We will tell you this before invoicing, not after.
Heavy wordplay
Puns, acrostics and invented language get flagged and solved by the human editor, not the system. Books built on them cost more and take longer.
Japanese and Korean
Our divergence scores on these pairs are materially worse than on European languages. We publish those numbers and we quote longer timelines because of them.
Every edition ships with a record of how it was made.
You get a provenance document listing the passes run, the editor who signed off, the scope of their edit, and the disclosure language we recommend for your copyright page. Several markets now require some form of this, and reviewers ask about it whether or not the law does.
We would rather state the AI involvement as a fact on page four than have a reader discover it and feel misled. Half the people buying translation are hostile to machine translation for good reasons; the answer to that is documentation and a named editor, not silence.