Having your book translated
A translation is not a version of your book. It is a whole edition of it, written a second time by somebody else, and it costs what an edition costs.
Two guides own the ground either side of this one. Translations and foreign rights, for a self-published author covers the commercial shape — licensing versus commissioning, and which books are candidates. The copyright page of a translated book covers the notices, the credit and who owns what. This page is the working relationship: whether to start, who to hire, and how to tell whether what came back is any good.
The first decision is whether to commission one at all
Most authors open with what it costs. The more useful question is what the money is being bet on.
You are buying months of skilled work, in full, before a copy sells, to reach readers you cannot survey, in a language where you cannot tell an enthusiastic review from a polite one. There is no test market and no point halfway through where you know more than you did at the start. Every other production decision in self-publishing gives you a signal before the money is gone. This one does not.
So wait for evidence rather than enthusiasm. The useful signals are boring and countable: copies of your existing edition already selling through that country's store, reader mail arriving in that language, a series with enough books that a new reader has somewhere to go next. Selling steadily at home is a weaker signal than it feels like, because what carried the book — your newsletter, your reviews, your categories — does not cross the border with it.
Set the same money beside the alternative. Another book in your own language reaches an audience you have already proved exists, through channels you already run. Fund a translation out of profit, at a size that can fail without stopping the next book.
Hire a native speaker of the target language
Into their first language, always. Translators work into the language they grew up in, not out of it. That is the professional norm, and it is the single most reliable quality filter available to someone who cannot read the output. A fluent non-native speaker can produce accurate sentences that no reader in that market would ever have written. Somebody offering to translate in both directions is telling you something about their practice.
Someone who reads your genre. Register is most of translation. The choices that decide whether a page reads as crime, as literary fiction or as a manual are made line by line, and they are made correctly by a translator who has read two hundred books of that kind in that language. A technically faultless translation can still land in the wrong register throughout.
Look where the professionals are: national translator associations with member directories, and the credit pages of translated books in your genre — the name on a book you admire is a real referral.
Judging work in a language you cannot read
You cannot assess it directly. You can assess it indirectly, with three cheap instruments used together.
A paid sample from two translators, same passage. A thousand to two thousand words, taken from the middle rather than the opening you have polished. The method is the one in Working with an editor without wasting the money, and paying for it keeps the comparison honest.
Two native readers you trust, who are not the translators. Give them both samples without saying who did which. Ask which one reads like a published book in that language, where they stumbled, and whether the dialogue sounds like people. You are borrowing the judgment you lack, so it matters that they read books rather than simply speak the language.
A back-translation of one short passage, done by a third person, to check meaning rather than style. Back-translation always reads awkwardly; that is not a finding. You are looking for a fact that changed, a clause that vanished, a sentiment that reversed, a name that drifted.
In the Interior Formatter. The translated manuscript is a new book here: it reads the .docx your translator sends for structure only — chapter starts, italics, scene breaks — and finds chapters even in a file with no styles, which is common when the file comes back from someone working in their own templates. The EPUB declares the edition's language, which is what reading devices use to speak it correctly. Start your book → · about the Interior Formatter
What the translator needs from you
A glossary. Every name, place and invented term, with the spelling you use, how you say it, and any meaning you intended. A surname chosen because it sounds cold, a coined word built from two real ones, a title that is also a pun — none of that is recoverable from the text, so the translator will otherwise guess or ask.
A note on voice and register. How formal the narration is, whether characters are meant to sound educated or regional, what the humor is doing. Two or three paragraphs, plus comparable books in the target language if you know any.
Answers, promptly. Expect the sharpest questions your book has ever been asked. An editor can leave an ambiguity standing; a translator has to pick a word, and in many languages that means deciding a character's gender, age or social distance before you have. Some of those questions will show you a real hole in the original.
A frozen text. Deliver the final, proofread manuscript and then stop editing it. Changes mid-translation are re-work you pay for twice.
Put the terms in writing before the work starts
An email you have both replied to is enough, and it needs six things: the scope, as a real word count; the deadline, both ways; the delivery format, which should be a .docx carrying your structure; how many revision rounds are included and what counts as one; the credit, meaning where the translator's name appears and in what form; and who owns the translation.
That last one is not a formality. A translation is a new copyrightable work, and the default owner is the person who made it — The copyright page of a translated book sets out what an assignment and a license each mean, and why settling it afterwards is a negotiation with someone who already holds what you need.
Machine translation, honestly
It is genuinely useful to you as a reader: skimming reviews in that market, understanding an email from a retailer, getting the gist of something quickly. It is not publishable as the book, and readers notice within a page.
Be careful with the offer that sits in between. Post-editing — a person tidying machine output at a fraction of the full rate — is a real service, but at the cheap end it is a proofread of a draft nobody wrote. Ask who is accountable for the finished text and whether they are a native speaker working into their own language. Where these tools are used anywhere in the chain, some stores ask you to say so — see AI in the writing process, and what stores ask you to declare.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Translations and foreign rights, for a self-published author · More: The copyright page of a translated book · Bilingual books and facing-page layout · The style sheet: how a series stays consistent