We built a reading app that translates e-books into your native language
I love reading serious non-fiction, ancient history, emotional intelligence, primatology, that kind of thing. But a lot of great books never get translated into my language, and reading them in the original was hard going for me. I would start a book and more often than not give up on it, because looking up individual words, or pasting paragraphs into a translator a chunk at a time, kills any pleasure you get from reading. I kept waiting for one of the big players to finally put a proper AI translator inside their reader, and it never happened. So my friends and colleagues and I (a brilliant developer, a designer who came from a publishing house and is obsessed with typography, and a linguist who speaks half a dozen languages) decided to do it ourselves.
We made Globoox.co, a reading app with AI translation built in. You add your EPUB in the original language, pick the language you want to read it in, English, Russian, French or Spanish, and just enjoy the book.
A word on the translation itself. We wrote our own code so the model works with the context of the book rather than one paragraph at a time, we spent a long time on the prompts, and we test the output both against MQM Translation Quality and with linguists and native speakers, so it rests on measured parameters as well as on what readers actually tell us. A small grant we got to cover tokens is what lets us keep the app free.
This is for anyone with books they keep meaning to read and cannot, because of the language. I would really like to hear what you think.