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Upload a German EPUB and get the first fifteen pages back in English. The recurring problem in this direction is that German packs into one word what English needs a phrase for — and the same word has to be unpacked the same way every single time.
The first 15 pages of text are sent to our server to be translated. The file itself stays on your device.
A German compound noun is a small sentence with the spaces removed. English has to unpack it into a phrase, and there is usually more than one defensible phrase. That is fine once. Over three hundred pages, if the same compound is unpacked three different ways, the reader loses the thread of what is a recurring concept and what is a new one — and in a technical or philosophical book that is fatal.
Then there is the separable verb: the prefix that changes what the verb means gets stranded at the end of the clause, so the meaning of the sentence is only settled by its last word. A translator that reads forward and commits early gets these wrong in a way that looks fluent.
Reading the whole book first is what makes the vocabulary stable. Recurring terms are collected and fixed before a word is translated, so the same German concept keeps the same English name throughout the sample.
A DRM-free EPUB. The file stays on your device; only the text of the sample is sent.
Recurring compounds and terms are collected into a guide first, so each one gets one English equivalent and keeps it.
About 4,500 words as a complete EPUB you can download or read here. English comes out shorter than the German it came from.
Sie disappears. English has one "you". The distance a German character creates by refusing to switch to du has to become tone, and some of it does not survive the crossing.
Long sentences get restructured. German tolerates nesting that English does not. Where a sentence has to be split, it is split — consistently, as part of the register set from the whole book, rather than at random.
Fifteen pages, not the book. About 4,500 words.
The text is sent to a server and discarded when the job finishes.
That is the point of reading the entire book before translating anything. Recurring terms go into a guide and the guide is applied to every page, so a concept that appears in chapter one under one English name still has that name in chapter nine.
They are read as whole clauses rather than word by word, which is the only way to get them right — the prefix sitting at the end of the clause is what decides the verb's meaning, so the clause has to be understood before any of it is written.
Old orthography (ß where modern German uses ss, older inflections) is read correctly as text. What the tool does not do is reproduce archaic English to match an archaic German — the register follows the book, but the English is modern.
About 4,500 words, roughly fifteen pages, five books a day.
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The app translates the entire book and can show the English beside the German, so the original stays available when a compound will not fit into one English phrase.
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