The MAX plan: book translation with a manuscript check and eight covers

MAX is our most thorough book translation plan, made for an edition you'll send to agents or publishers. It runs on our Socrates Engine, which adds editing passes built for your book and checks every chapter against the original. Before the final version, you get a report of questions about your manuscript, then choose from eight covers designed for it. Delivery: 5–7 business days.

The Socrates Engine
The manuscript check
8 covers to choose from

Start translating now

A marble bust of a Greek philosopher beside an open book, with slips of paper rising from its pages

15+checks and rewrites on every paragraph
Over 3×the editing passes of our other plans
633facts checked in a single nonfiction book
8covers to choose from, designed for your book

Hundreds of paper strips passing through a row of glass panes, with a small stack of chosen strips left at the end

The Socrates Engine: how MAX translates your book

More than 15 checks and rewrites on every paragraph
MAX runs more than three times as many editing passes as our other plans. Together they make sure the meaning holds and the prose flows, that nothing sounds translated or is left in the original language, that idioms and wordplay work, and that tone, rhythm and phrasing sound natural. Needless repetition gets caught, too.
At key stages, several AI models compete on each passage
A full-length book runs to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of short passages. Any passage that sounds stiff, flat or translated is rewritten, and the new version is checked before it goes into the book. For meaning, idioms, wordplay and rhythm, models from different AI companies each write their own version, and the engine keeps the best.
Finally, the engine reads the book cover to cover
This last read is our most demanding editing pass, and every fix it turns up goes through the same competition between models again before the book reaches you.

An engine rebuilt for every book

The engine studies each book and adds editing passes made for it alone. A few books we've translated, and what each one got:

Erotic scenes and crude language
The book got extra passes to make sure no scene was softened, and that its intensity and crude language stayed exactly as they were in the original.
A poetic book rich in description
Dedicated passes sharpened its visual descriptions, so they come alive in translation just as they do in the original.
Clever wordplay
A whole pass went to the wordplay, so the puns work in translation too.
A book of jokes
The engine shifted its priorities to focus on the author's voice and humor, so the jokes land in another language too.
Loss and dry humor
A book about loss, with dry humor and a cast of distinct characters, got an in-depth pass on the characters' inner lives. The dialogue tightened, and the punchlines and wordplay landed.

A clipped report with colored tabs, a magnifying glass, a pencil and note cards with circled lines

The manuscript check

Before the final version, you'll get a single report, organized by chapter. Each question shows where it occurs in the book and suggests a fix, and questions about facts also cite a source. Most of the time, a simple "yes" is all it takes.

Consistency
Ages, dates, names and the rules of the world you built, from chapter to chapter.
Facts
Names, events, quotes and verses, compared with published sources. Every finding is double-checked.
Characters
How each character changes over the course of the book, and how they sound in every line of dialogue.
Your decisions
Imagery, repetition, quotes and poems that only you can decide on.

What we found in manuscripts

Examples from reports we've sent to authors.

A novel: a boy whose age keeps changing, and an astronomy mistake

A boy is twelve in chapter 7, ten in chapter 27 and nine in chapter 41, and only a few months pass between them. We asked how old he was meant to be.
A character explains that the moon looks thin because it is at apogee. In fact, that comes from its phase, not its distance. We asked whether the character's mistake was intentional or should be fixed.

Another novel: 27 errors after editing and proofreading

In two neighboring paragraphs, the same child's father goes by two different names.
A news article inside the book says Air Force in its headline and Navy in its body.
The book puts a real-life maker of musical instruments in the 19th century, but he worked in the late 18th.
The book quotes a famous English poem in Hebrew translation. We suggested using the poem's original English words in the translation, rather than translating them back from the Hebrew.
A character says she is seventy-three, and a little later that she is long past eighty. The author explained that the gap was deliberate, so the text stayed as it was.

The author wrote to say she couldn't believe we'd found 27 errors in a book that had already been through the best editors and proofreaders.

A nonfiction book: 633 facts checked

We checked 633 facts against published sources and sent the author 35 points, each with a suggested fix and a source.
A famous actress is placed at an event that, by every account from the time, she never attended.
A "burning tree" where the Bible has a bush, while elsewhere in the same chapter the book itself says "the burning bush".
Two quotes we could not find in any source. We suggested presenting them as the author's own interpretation.
The opening gives one figure; the same page and the back cover give another.
Bible verses rendered in English from Christian translations. We suggested the standard Jewish translation instead.
An opening phrase used in about 17 scenes and an image used about 45 times. In English it stands out more, so we asked whether to vary them.

Book cover design: eight covers to choose from

Once you approve your book's profile, we design eight front covers that fit its content and its readers. Each one carries the title and your name in the target language, and each differs from the others in imagery, colors, typeface and title placement. You choose your cover in your account, and if none of them is right, we'll design more.