Show HN: Booktranslate.ai – Recursive AI Translation Engine for Full Books

Hi all - I’m an indie dev and publisher who’s spent years manually translating books. I finally got tired of it and built BookTranslate.ai - a recursive, glossary-enforced, multi-pass AI translation system designed specifically for full-length books (nonfiction, essays, philosophy, etc., probably not good enough for fiction though).

It runs each paragraph through several passes with a sliding context window (previous few paragraphs) to maintain tone and coherence. Glossary terms are strictly enforced mid-prompt, and formatting is preserved.

It’s kind of like a lightweight RAG-style workflow, but prompt-orchestrated instead of vectorized.

It outputs ~98% publishable translations, even in languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. I’ve used it to translate libertarian works to Hungarian and forgotten Hungarian free market economists to English, and people never even guessed it's almost all AI. No hallucination, no over-polish, and a really high rhetorical fidelity.

I couldn't really find anything that comes even close to what this system produces in translation quality.

Would love feedback about it! AMA!