Your Book in Another Language, One Paragraph at a Time.
Shiro can translate your book into any of 12 languages, inside the project, with each paragraph beside its original and your invented names held to a glossary. What comes out is a machine draft. Someone who knows the language has to read it, and for a book you mean to sell, a professional translator is often the right call.
Twelve Languages, Inside the Book
A book can carry English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. You add one under Publish, in Translations, and it stays part of the same project, sharing the World, the Board and the cover with the original.
Shiro tells you what a run will take before it starts: so many words in so many scenes, with this model, for about this much. It works in passages of about 1,200 words and saves each scene as it finishes, so you can stop and pick up later. It uses whichever model you’ve chosen, including a local one, and scenes hidden from Shiro are never sent. Each language’s quotes and spacing are set afterwards, so your French dialogue doesn’t arrive in English punctuation.
Side by Side, and in Step
In Write, a scene opens with the original on one side and the translation on the other, paragraph against paragraph. This is where the real work happens, and it’s slower than the machine part.
Each translated paragraph remembers which original it came from. You’ll go on revising after you swore you’d stopped, and when you do, the paragraph is marked “The original changed”, with Keep mine and Update beside it. A batch run never replaces a paragraph you rewrote yourself. It waits for you.
The Glossary Keeps Greywater as Greywater
Names and invented words come from your World. Leave a term empty and it stays as written. Fill it in and the model is told to use your version every time, which is how a town stays one town from page 12 to page 200. Shiro can suggest values for you to check, and they’re stored on the World entry, so every book in a series shares them.
Out as an Edition
An edition in Publish can carry a language. You get the usual EPUB, PDF or Word file with the translated text and titles, and chapter labels in that language. A paragraph not yet translated comes out in the original, and Export tells you how many there are, which is better than a reader telling you.
When to Hire a Translator
Machine drafts tend to go wrong in the places you care about most: jokes, wordplay, a character’s dialect, the rhythm of a sentence you spent a week on, a tone that’s funny in one culture and rude in another. They can also be smoothly, fluently wrong, which is hard to spot in a language you don’t read.
So use Shiro to get a draft for yourself, for a foreign publisher who wants a look, or for a language you read well enough to fix. If you’re publishing into a language you can’t judge, pay someone who can, or at least pay a fluent reader. A professional will also make choices about your book that a model doesn’t know are choices.
Ask before you hand a translator the machine draft: many would rather start from your original. A series bible can be exported with a translator in mind, carrying the glossary, the style sheet and the relationships. And if you have a publisher, check who holds the translation rights before you do anything at all.
Stores have views too. Amazon asks about AI-generated translations at upload, and our guide to that question covers how to answer it.
The Questions People Ask
Can AI translate a whole novel?
It can produce a complete draft, and Shiro will run the whole book for you. Whether that draft is publishable depends on the model, the languages and the book. Plan on a fluent reader going through all of it.
Which languages does Shiro translate into?
English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
What does it cost to translate a book?
It depends on the model. Before a run, Shiro shows the words, the scenes and the estimated cost. A local model is free, your own key is billed by the provider, and Shiro Cloud uses your plan’s allowance.
Does Amazon count this as AI-generated?
Amazon’s KDP question covers AI-generated translations, so answer it honestly. Shiro counts paragraphs it wrote as AI-generated text of that language, even after you rewrite them.
Can I translate by hand in Shiro?
Yes. Add a language and type in the side-by-side view. It works with AI turned off, and you still get told when the original changes.