Our Books in Other Languages

Why we translate, and what we try to get right.

A story does not survive translation by accident. Word-for-word accuracy will get you a document. It will not get you a book someone stays up too late finishing.

So that is the standard we work to. When one of our books appears in another language, the goal is not that it can be understood. The goal is that it reads as though it belongs there — that a reader who picks it up has the same experience as a reader of the original, and never has the sense of looking at something through glass.

What that means in practice

Voice comes first. Every one of our authors sounds like herself and like no one else, and that voice is the thing readers actually come back for. A translation that flattens it into competent, neutral prose has lost the book even when every sentence is technically correct.

Idiom gets rebuilt rather than carried across. Jokes have to land in the new language, not merely be explained in it. A turn of phrase that is warm in one language can be stiff or strange in another, so the job is to find what does the same work — the same wit, the same ache, the same rhythm on the page.

And the small things get their own attention: how characters address each other, what is funny in one culture and puzzling in the next, the difference between formal and familiar, the beat of a sentence that has to land before a chapter break.

Why we bother

Because readers deserve the actual book. Not an approximation of it, and not a version that quietly asks them to do the work of imagining what it was like in the original.

It would be faster to do less. We would rather take the time and hand a reader something whole.

Finding an edition

Use the language switcher at the top of any page to browse the site in the languages we currently offer. Not every title is available in every language yet — we translate steadily rather than all at once, and new editions are added as they are ready.

If a book you want is not yet available in your language, it may simply be in progress. Our newsletter is the first place we announce new editions.