guides · July 2, 2026
Showcase: a 110-chapter novel, translated end to end
The claim on our books page is easy to write and hard to do: names kept consistent from the first page to the last. So we measured it — on a real novel, end to end, and we're publishing the numbers.
The book
Kokoro (こころ) by Natsume Sōseki, 1914 — one of the most-read novels in Japan, and long out of copyright (our source text comes from Aozora Bunko, the Japanese public-domain library). It's a fitting stress test: 110 numbered sections across three parts, about 170,000 characters, and a cast the narrator mostly calls by role — Sensei, Okusan, Ojōsan, and the friend known only as K.
That cast is exactly what breaks stitched-together translations. Translate the book in disconnected chunks and 先生 arrives as "Sensei" in one chapter, "the teacher" in the next, "my master" in a third. By chapter forty, the reader is doing detective work.
The run
One EPUB in, English selected, no hand-holding: the pipeline read the structure, built a glossary of recurring names, translated all 110 sections with surrounding context in view, and produced a finished English EPUB — cover, parts, chapters, and table of contents intact. Total wall-clock time: under an hour, unattended. Total cost: less than a paperback.
What the glossary did
Before translating, Langelic identified the book's recurring people and places and pinned a rendering for each — this book got a 15-entry glossary, built automatically:
| Original | Pinned rendering | Policy |
|---|---|---|
| 先生 | Sensei | transliterate |
| 奥さん | Okusan | transliterate |
| お嬢さん | Ojosan | transliterate |
| Ｋ | K | transliterate |
| 雑司ヶ谷 | Zoshigaya | transliterate |
Every packet of text translated afterwards sees these pins, so section 108 makes the same call as section 3.
The measurements
After the run we queried the finished translation directly:
| Check | Result |
|---|---|
| Sections where Sensei appears | 55 of 110 |
| Times "Sensei" is rendered | 558 |
| Renderings as "the teacher" / "Professor" / "my master" | 0 |
| Times "Okusan" is rendered | 391, across 56 sections |
| Drift variants found for any pinned name | 0 |
That's the whole claim, tested: one name, one rendering, 558 times in a row — not because a human proofread it, but because the pipeline carries the decision forward.
What we're not claiming
This is a machine translation of a literary classic, honestly labelled. A human literary translator would make a thousand better sentence-level choices — Kokoro has celebrated human translations, and if you want the book at its best, read one. What this run demonstrates is the mechanical promise: structure preserved, names consistent, a real book back on your e-reader — for the vast majority of books that will never get a human translation at all.
Try it on the book you actually want
The novel everyone in your fandom mentions. The memoir that never left its home market. The sequel the publisher abandoned. Drop in the EPUB or PDF, see the cost estimate up front, and read it tonight.