New readers
Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian: hundreds of millions of readers, and Amazon stores in each of those languages.
Making books travel
Every great invention has taken texts out of a few hands and put them into many others. AI translation is the next one.
For thousands of years, a book was a rare object. Copying a single one by hand took months, sometimes years. Then each invention did the same thing: it took texts out of a few hands and put them into many others.
One frontier remained that neither the printing press nor the Internet had really crossed: language. A book written in French does not exist for a reader who only reads Polish. Translating it costs thousands of euros, and the vast majority of books never will be.
That is the frontier artificial intelligence is starting to lower. We created Librolingua for that.
How texts learned to travel
- c. 3200 BC
Writing
In Mesopotamia, accountants press signs into clay. For the first time, a spoken word outlives the person who said it.
- Antiquity – Middle Ages
The age of scribes
Every book is copied by hand, page after page. A single Bible can take a copyist months of work. Books are rare, expensive, reserved for a few.
- 9th century
Baghdad translates the world
At the House of Wisdom, scholars translate Aristotle, Euclid and Galen into Arabic. Without these translations, part of Greek knowledge would have been lost.
- 12th century
The translators of Toledo
Christians, Jews and Muslims carry these texts from Arabic into Latin. Europe rediscovers science through translation.
- c. 1455
The printing press
Gutenberg prints his Bible in Mainz. Within fifty years, Europe produces millions of books. The price of a book collapses and reading spreads.
- 1522
Printing and translating
Luther publishes the New Testament in German. Printing and translation together put a text in the hands of a whole people, in their own language.
- 20th century
The paperback
Penguin in 1935: great books at the price of a packet of cigarettes. Literature becomes popular.
- 2000s
Self-publishing
Ebooks and print on demand let anyone publish, with no publisher and no stock. Millions of authors take the plunge.
- Today
Translation for everyone
An artificial intelligence can translate an entire novel in a few hours, into dozens of languages. The last frontier of the book, language, is starting to fall.
What we do not claim
Our translations are made by artificial intelligences. We do not claim they equal the work of a great literary translator, which remains an art: choosing the right word, carrying a voice, reinventing a pun. When a book deserves that work and its budget allows it, it should be entrusted to a human translator.
But most books will never have that budget. For them, the question is not “human translation or AI translation”, it is “AI translation or no translation at all”. That is where we are useful.
Why it is serious all the same
We do not simply feed a text into a machine. Every book follows a chain: a model first reads the book and writes its style sheet (characters, tone, recurring terms); the book is translated passage by passage following that sheet; independent reviewer agents compare each paragraph with the original; an arbiter agent settles each disagreement; automatic checks verify that nothing is missing. And you receive a report telling you what we chose, and what we invite you to check.
What this changes for an author
A cost that is finally affordable
A human translation costs thousands of euros; here, hundreds. A translation can pay for itself with a few dozen sales.
Days, not months
Your book translated and formatted in a few days, ready to publish.
You stay in charge
Your settings, your glossary, your instructions. And an editable file you can have reviewed by whomever you like.
Scribes made texts durable. Printing made them affordable. The Internet made them accessible. What remains is to make them understandable by everyone, in every language. That is, on our small scale, what we are trying to do: for your book to find its readers, wherever they are.