Translate Your Book - TODAY!

Simply click Translate Now on the homepage. Upload your .epub or .docx, confirm the auto-detected metadata, and select your target languages. That's it – BookShift handles the rest.

There's no chapter-by-chapter review, and no step-by-step process. We work on your ENTIRE book at once, so voice and important contextual elements are preserved throughout the translation. This means you only have to upload your file once. The entire book gets translated as a coherent whole—not pieced together.

Yes – absolutely. You retain full and exclusive rights to everything you upload and everything you receive. We make NO CLAIM on your translated content.

No.

The act of translation, by whatever method, does not remove your copyright.

The translation is based on YOUR work, which YOU own the copyright to.

Translating it does NOT remove copyright. (That's also why you're forbidden from translating other people's copyrighted works. It's legally and morally wrong. If translation removed copyright, then anyone could publish anyone's works... but that's not the case!)

Bookshift is designed to work with longer text content. It works well with non-fiction genres like history, memoirs, and anything else that's primarily text. Bookshift doesn't translate or preserve internal images, so any diagrams, tables, etc. will be lost and need to be manually re-inserted. In the future, we intend to create a full non-fiction offering that preserves all original tables, diagrams, images, etc. as well as specially formatted, beautiful .epubs... but for now, Bookshift only works with the text.

No :)

While it's good to have a well-formatted document, we do our best to fix formatting issues so that the output book has properly marked chapters and sub-headings, even if your original is a bit messy.

We'll usually fix them... unless it's clearly authorial intent!

For example, a character who deliberately speaks with non-standard grammar will retain their voice and will speak in correspondingly ungrammatical ways in the target language.

But if you simply made a small grammar mistake, a typo, an error with a homophone, etc. in the original, it will be corrected and fixed in the translation. We fix your mistakes, but preserve your deliberate stylistic choices.

If you don't have access to a native speaker, a reasonable way to do this is to copy some of the original and some of the translation and paste it into an LLM like Claude, Google Pro 2.5, ChatGPT, etc. and ask it.

Tip 1: Don't paste a lot at once. If you do, it will give a poor assessment of quality.

Tip 2: If you're comparing different translations (for example, if you want to compare a Bookshift chapter translation with one from Sonnet or ChatGPT etc.), don't tell the LLM the sources of the translations, as they have biases. Just call them 'Translation 1' and 'Translation 2' or similar.

For manuscripts, we support .epub and .docx. The output files are in a ready-to-use .epub and a ready-to-edit or format .docx. Our output image files are in .jpg format.

Our system uses a comprehensive iterative proofreading and improvement system. Each individual chapter is reviewed multiple times for mistranslations, errors, awkward phrasing, etc. The output file should have really excellent translation quality. And if you had typos or grammar errors in the original... we probably fixed them in the translation!

That said, a talented human literary translator has a unique skillset that hasn't yet been matched by machines. If you want a literary rewriting, then by all means hire a human editor. But if you're worried about minor errors and inconsistencies, awkward translations, etc., our system is designed to completely eliminate them and make the output book sound completely natural in the target language.

We believe our translation quality is unmatched, and the quality of the translated book you receive will be publication-ready. For 95% of books, our translation will have fewer errors than the original manuscript :)

Our system is designed to handle all of these things with style and grace.

Most idioms can't be directly translated, so they're translated to the best equivalent in the target language.

If a joke can be well directly translated (slapstick for example can be fairly universally translated), then our system will do that. If not (most puns for example), we try to find something equally amusing as a substitute.

Slang is translated to whatever is culturally and stylistically most appropriate for your book.

Catchphrases, running gags, nicknames, etc. are all identified before translation even begins, so they can be handled consistently throughout the book.

Unique terms (like a fantasy term from the world, a fictional business name, etc.) are handled case-by-case and language-by-language. A decision is made about how to handle them before translation begins, and may vary from language to language. For example, it might make sense in some languages to preserve words like 'Madame' or 'Herr' because that's standard in the target language, in other cases the terms get translated... because that's what readers in the target language expect.

Our system works intelligently based on the language being translated to, the genre, the authorial voice, and a variety of other factors. Each translation project is unique and is treated as such by Bookshift.

Books take 10-30 minutes, depending on length. A novella might take less. An epic novel will take a bit longer.

There's no limit as such (except for the minimum of 3000 words), but for a long boxset, it would be better to break it up book by book. Our system analyzes a book before it begins for its unique terms, voices, characters, etc., and if you submit a whole bunch of books at once, probably some of that will get lost. A small boxset of five novellas will probably be fine. But if you're the author of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series... we recommend you go book by book!

Please only translate books that you own the copyright to, or that are in the public domain. If you want to create your personal translation of Pride and Prejudice into Urdu and you have a public domain copy, then go right ahead!

Sure! But make sure the book you're translating is actually in the public domain. For example, you can NOT re-translate someone else's new translation of a classic, you have to use the original public domain version.

You can't translate a modern version of a classic that includes a new introduction or literary analysis etc., because that will be copyrighted.

We're happy and eager for you to bring classics to new parts of the world, especially to under-represented languages or where existing translations are poor, incomplete, or outdated... but please make sure the actual text you're translating is in the public domain first!

Not yet! But if you're interested in Bookshift Publish, where we translate your book and publish it on global marketplaces and send you the royalties, please email [email protected] and let us know you're interested, and we'll put you on the waitlist!

Yes! You can either upload an existing cover and translate the text on it, or create a brand new one with our new AI cover tool. Both options are optimized to give you an image file with the exact dimensions recommended by Amazon and suitable for all other major platforms.

You don't even have to find your original book cover file – if it's in your .epub file, we'll just extract it for you!

Note: Our book cover translator is VERY 'sensitive' and will reject racy covers. If your cover is 'rejected' by our system, we'll automatically create a NEW cover that's as close to the original as possible.

We do a full analysis of the original, from colors to mood to genre and fonts etc., to replicate it as well as possible with our cover generator.

And of course, you can also use our cover generator on its own if you want to create a new book cover!

No! You don't need any design experience. BookShift automatically handles formatting, placement, fonts, and layout.

No. We only work with 'non-editable' .jpg and .png files. That's actually our unique value proposition!

No. You may only translate book covers that you own or have permission from the copyright holder to use. Do NOT for example translate Penguin's cover of Pride and Prejudice. Please use our cover generator to create a new cover.

We run multiple internal reviews of every chapter and then of every complete file before delivery. But if something slips through the cracks or you're not satisfied, we'll quickly fix the issue.

You can always request a full refund or a re-translation and bonus credits. We think our system is highly robust and reliable... but if your book somehow 'breaks' it, we'd love to get to the bottom of that and offer you additional translation credits as compensation!

Your satisfaction is the most important thing!

BookShift currently supports more than 30+ languages, including:

• English
• Español (Spanish)
• Deutsch (German)
• Français (French)
• Italiano (Italian)
• Português (Portuguese)
• Русский (Russian)
• 中文 (简体 / 繁體 – Chinese Simplified & Traditional)
• 한국어 (Korean)
• हिन्दी (Hindi)
• বাংলা (Bengali)
• اردو (Urdu)
• ગુજરાતી (Gujarati)

...and more.
We regularly add new languages.

No. Our system is fully automated. However, BookShift uses an advanced multi-stage iterative pipeline designed to preserve your voice, detect context-sensitive terms, and ensure natural, fluent output that doesn't sound like "translation language."

Self-checks are performed multiple times on every chapter and then on the entire file.

It should be very high standard by the time you receive it.

Yes. We translate all genres, from sweet romantic comedies to steamy romance and graphic horror stories. We don't censor or water down your voice – what you write, we translate.

Note: We don't translate content that's illegal in the US or violates Amazon's terms of service. (We're not affiliated with Amazon, but their terms of service are a useful 'guideline' for what's acceptable.)

Generally, if you can publish it without breaking the rules of major distributors, then you can translate it with Bookshift.

We use a multi-stage iterative process. First, we create a unique style and creation guide for YOUR book, so our translation can be consistent throughout. After translating every chapter, we make sure it follows the unique style guide of YOUR BOOK. After that, we iteratively improve every chapter multiple times to make sure every idiom is correctly translated, every joke lands, and everything sounds natural, not translated.

The Magic Proofreader is the (English-language) BEST proofreading tool for authors. It takes your .docx file and performs a human-like proofread of the entire book, using 'track changes' and leaving intelligent and helpful comments. It catches things that other grammar checkers like Grammarly don't catch, for example if the 'wrong' character is speaking, or if the spelling of their name suddenly changes mid-scene. ('Sarah' became 'Sara' for example.) It also catches more homonym errors than other checkers, as well as many other grammar errors that creep in that other checkers just can't detect.

Unlike other grammar checkers, it does NOT try to flag every technical error. It knows when a character is supposed to speak ungrammatically. It understands your unique style. It recognizes your world terms. It's just smarter than everything else out there.

It's not perfect, of course, but we find that we accept about 90% of its recommended changes. With Grammarly or Pro Writing Aid or Microsoft's Word checkers, we usually reject more than half of their suggestions. The Magic Proofreader catches more real errors, while flagging far fewer deliberate rule-bending writing choices.

The proofread document is returned to you as a properly marked-up .docx, exactly as if you'd used a human proofreader, along with helpful comments, a detailed report about your book and your writing style, and it does all of that in minutes instead of weeks.

The Magic Proofreader is the best proofreader for a busy author.

You can reach us at [email protected] or join our friendly author community on Discord. We'll get back to you as quickly as possible – usually fast!