The night I decided enough was enough
It was half past eleven at night. In front of me: a 200-page PDF in English, a cup of coffee that had gone cold a while ago, and the same ChatGPT tab open for the tenth time in the browser.
I'd been doing the same thing for an hour: select a chunk of text, copy it, paste it into the chat, wait for the translation, copy it, paste it into another document... and repeat. Page 28 of 200. Page. Twenty-eight.
I did the quick mental math and immediately regretted it.
The problem when you ask an AI to translate
Artificial intelligence has changed things in a way we still haven't fully processed. Right now you can ask a language model to translate a chunk of text and the result is... good. Really good, actually. Nothing like the Google Translate of ten years ago, the one that turned any sentence into something vaguely resembling what you wanted to say but with a strange, inexplicable accent.
But there's a detail that seems to have gotten lost in all the excitement: conversational AIs are designed to have conversations. Not to process entire documents. They have a limit on what they can read at once, and when you throw 100 pages at them all at once, they either say they can't, or they translate part of it and make up the rest with a confidence that's genuinely alarming.
So what do the rest of us do. Those of us with a technical book in English we need to read for work. Those of us who found a manual that doesn't exist in our language. Those of us who want to translate a grandparent's memoirs written in another language. Those of us who simply... don't want to go crazy copy-pasting until two in the morning.
What we do is give up. Or look for alternatives.
The alternatives that aren't really alternatives
Google Translate with documents: yes, Google has a feature for uploading PDFs. It translates them. Technically. The problem is that the result reads like it was translated by someone who learned the target language studying instruction manuals from the '90s. You can forgive some rigidity, but there are moments when a sentence doesn't just lose nuance—it loses its meaning entirely. And in the middle of the AI era, the fact that Google Translate is still the official answer for long documents is... let's say disappointing.
DeepL: yes, it does something similar to what I wanted. And it works better than Google Translate, credit where it's due. The problem is the price. Having built this and knowing from the inside what it actually costs to process a document, I can say without fear of being wrong that DeepL is keeping a margin that would make a Saudi sheikh blush. And then there are the other "AI translation" services that promise revolutionary, affordable-for-everyone prices on their landing page, but the moment you try to upload your document, a little screen appears saying €25 and you fall off your chair.
Professional translation services: they exist, they work, and sometimes they're the right option. But they have a price. And a turnaround time. And sometimes you just need to understand what that chapter is about today, right now, without waiting three days or paying through the nose.
Browser plugins and extensions: I've tried several. Most translate paragraph by paragraph as you browse, which is fine for reading articles. But it's completely useless when you have a downloaded PDF and want the whole document translated with its structure intact.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini (by hand): which is exactly what I was doing that night. Which works. Which gives good results. Which is absolutely unsustainable if the document has more than four pages.
The service I wished had existed
It wasn't a sudden flash of inspiration with dramatic lighting and violins in the background. It was more of a quiet exasperation, the kind where you realize you've been going around a problem for too long without attacking it directly.
The question was simple: why doesn't something exist that does this automatically?
You upload the file. You say what language you want. You wait. You download it.
No copying. No pasting. No counting characters. No opening twenty tabs. No burning a hole in my wallet.
The answer, it turned out, was that similar things did exist. But none that did it well. None that truly used modern AI models, with all their capability, to produce a translation that sounded like a person and not a dictionary. None that were simple enough for anyone to use without needing their own instruction manual.
If you want something done right, you know what they say.
What I built
The app does exactly what should have existed for a long time: you take a book, a PDF, a document, whatever, you upload it, choose the target language, and the AI translates it completely. Not in fragments you have to reassemble yourself. Not with the flat quality of a classic automatic translator. With the most powerful language models that exist right now, ones that understand context, maintain tone, and produce a perfect, human translation.
And in seconds. Well, maybe a minute if the book has 600 pages... But you're not doing anything during that minute. You can go reheat your coffee.
What mattered most to me when building it was that it be simple. Not simple like "we've simplified the interface but it's still complicated underneath." Simple like: you arrive, upload the file, get the translation. No endless sign-ups, no weird configurations, no wondering if you're using it right.
Because the problem wasn't technical. The AI models already existed. The capability was already there. What was missing was someone connecting the dots so that the result was accessible to anyone—not just those who know how to talk to an API.
Who this is for
For the person who found an incredible book that was never translated into their language and has been putting off reading it for months.
For the researcher who has to review academic literature in three languages and can't afford to lose the thread between copies and pastes.
For the person who received a contract in another language and needs to understand what they're signing before tomorrow.
For the student whose course material is in a foreign language and needs to focus on understanding the content, not translating it.
For anyone who has ever been on the verge of throwing their laptop after page forty of copy-pasting into ChatGPT.
Or for the person who has written their own book and wants to publish it in other languages.
That night at half past eleven I closed my laptop without having made it past page twenty-eight. I went to sleep with an idea going around in my head.
It took a while to build. But it's here now.
And right now, as I write this, someone somewhere is uploading a document that's been waiting for months. And in a few minutes they'll be able to read it.
That's enough.
Translate your entire document now. No copying. No pasting. No losing your mind.