Own Words own-words.pro
For literary translatorsCompare · checked 2026-09-26

The other ways to translate a book, by name.

What each one takes from you, what it does with it, and what it costs. Prices are what each product's own page showed on the date below. We bought nothing and ran nothing, so read this as a map, not a test report.

Checked 2026-09-26 · re-checked before every update
I
At a glance

Fourteen ways, one table.

Scroll the table sideways; the first column stays put.

ProductLearns your voice fromRemembers your correctionsShows what it usedMeasured quality figure100,000-word novelFreeBuilt for
Own WordsA whole past translation, aligned paragraph by paragraph; other writing of yours in the target language early accessEvery edit reaches the next draft; a rule you mark always is checked on every page early accessPer paragraph early accessWords changed, measured on one translator's book; published early access$25 at launch ($0.25 per 1,000 source words, minimum $15)Ten pages, full qualityliterary translators
TranslateABook1An editable “translation guide” the AI drafts from your book; a style copying add-on and pasted reference passagesNo loop; you edit the output file≈ €9 Standard · ≈ €27 Pro · ≈ €135 Author; add-ons ≈ €13 eachPreview; the Author preview €5indie authors, small publishers
BookTranslate.aiIts own reading of your manuscript (a “literary blueprint”); a glossary; nothing of yours“from ~$390”; tiers reported up to $3,900 per languageu — the premium anchorindie authors, small presses who would otherwise pay a human
Novo TranslatorAn auto-generated glossary you can edit; a style guide as a paid add-on≈ $11 ($2 per 100k characters); $12/month planPreview of the openingweb-novel readers, self-publishers
Luman (was GlobeScribe)2 3Nothing disclosed$100 flat per book per language (pre-acquisition page)authors, small presses, publishers “at scale”
BookTranslator.ai7Nothing; formatting preservedfrom $5.99 per 100k wordsureaders, quick personal copies
Immersive TranslateNothing; you pick the enginefree tier; Pro ≈ $9.99/month1,000 pages/monthbilingual readers, learners
Rask AIClaims to “preserve your voice”; no examples of yoursfree toolcasual use
DeepLA glossary; “Style Rules” typed as instructions on Team/Business plans; a translation memory (.tmx)Memory matches on the same sentenceMatch indicatorssubscription, from ≈ $9/user/monthWeb app free; memory needs Probusinesses, professionals
PhraseTranslation memories; “Custom AI” trains an engine on cleaned historical memoriesPer segment, inside the toolMatch percentagesfrom $27/month; Custom AI ≈ $1,245/month and upTriallocalisation teams
SmartcatMemories and glossaries feeding “AI co-workers”; text prompts for tonePer segmentMatch percentages≈ $1,200/year and upLimited trialagencies, enterprise
Lilt · Lara (ModernMT)5 6Adaptive MT: learns from your edits as you work, plus memoriesPer segment, inside a CAT toolSomeLilt: enterprise quotes · Lara: reported $9.99 to €25/month plus usageuTrialsprofessional translators, enterprise
Nuanxed4Human translators and editors, with AI for the first draftHumans doIf you askquotes only; a service, not a toolpublishers
A human literary translatorTheir own voice, or yours if you brief them wellIf you ask≈ €7,500 and five weeks (TranslateABook's own figure1)publishers, authors with a budget

u unverified: from a summary rather than a price page. “Learns your voice from” means the product reads something you wrote and draws on it for every paragraph. A text box that says “formal” is not that; neither is a memory that only fires when the same sentence comes round again. “Measured quality figure” means a number with a method behind it that a customer can check on their own text; none of the pages we read on 2026-09-26 showed one, and ours is measured but not yet published, hence the half mark.

II
Two families

And the gap between them.

Book translators (TranslateABook, BookTranslate.ai, Novo, Luman, BookTranslator.ai) take a manuscript and hand back a file. Their idea of style is what they can infer from the manuscript itself, plus whatever you type into a box. They are fast and, at the bottom of the range, nearly free. They are built for a self-publishing author who wants a Spanish edition by Friday.

Translation-memory and adaptive tools (DeepL, Phrase, Smartcat, Lilt, Lara) are built for professionals and enterprises. They can take your past translation as a memory, but a memory works sentence by sentence: it fires when the same or a very similar sentence comes round again, which in a novel is almost never. Lilt and Lara go further and adapt to your edits as you work, inside a CAT tool, at enterprise prices.

Nobody sells the combination. Upload a whole past translation, have the next book drafted in that voice, and keep steering it paragraph by paragraph with corrections that reach the next draft. TranslateABook's reference material and style-copying add-on are the nearest thing, and they are a text box and a checkbox, not an aligned book with an editing loop.

The price anchors

Three figures frame the market for a 100,000-word novel: Luman's $100 flat, what a small press has already paid for an unsteered AI draft; BookTranslate.ai's “from ~$390”, reported up to $3,900 per language, the premium anchor, for authors who would otherwise pay a human; and the human, ≈ €7,500 and five weeks, by TranslateABook's own reckoning. Own Words is $25 at launch, half of what it will be, because the draft is not the translation; the translator is.

III
Product by product

Each one, on its own terms.

TranslateABook

translateabook.com · per book, no subscription · three modes · 90+ languages · price calculator

The most serious of the book translators and the only one that lets you bring something of yourself. Standard and Pro translate in minutes; Author reads the whole book first, drafts an editable “translation guide” (names, terms, tone, audience) and proofreads. Two add-ons at about €13 each: custom instructions, and “style copying” from pasted passages. For a 100,000-word DOCX its calculator showed roughly €9, €25 to 28 and €129 to 143; InDesign files cost about double.

What it does not do: keep anything between books, learn from your edits (you get a file back and edit it elsewhere), or show which of your samples shaped a given paragraph. Its own anchor is worth repeating: a human would charge about €7,500 and take five weeks.

The closest competitor. If you want a file back and have no past translation, it is the one to try.

BookTranslate.ai

booktranslate.ai · per book, per language · “from ~$390”; tiers reported at $549 (reviewed) to $3,900 (publication), unverified

The premium anchor of the field. Five passes of translation and refinement, guided by a “literary blueprint” the system builds from your manuscript: themes, character voices, tone. A glossary and an editorial suite with AI suggestions. It takes nothing of yours as a voice source; the voice it preserves is the one it infers from the book, which is the author's, not the translator's. Aimed at authors and presses who would otherwise pay a human, and priced accordingly: fifteen to a hundred and fifty times what we charge, for a draft that reads only the manuscript.

The premium anchor. The author's voice, inferred; not yours, supplied.

Novo Translator

novotranslator.com · $2 per 100k characters, or $12/month for 1M credits · TXT, EPUB, DOCX

Whole-novel context: reads the book to detect genre, era and tone, builds a glossary of names and places you can edit, translates with consistency across chapters. A custom style guide is a paid add-on. A free preview of the opening before you commit. Built for web-novel readers and self-publishers who want cheap and consistent.

Cheap and consistent. No voice of yours in it.

Luman Translation (GlobeScribe)

globescribe.ai → Luman Technology · $100 per book per language on the pre-acquisition page; current tiers not shown

Launched 2025 by the founders of a fiction press, flat-priced, delivered within a day, and acquired into a “manuscript intelligence” platform in 2026. The page discloses no style input at all. Its price is the useful fact: $100 for a novel is what a small press has already been willing to pay for an unsteered AI draft.

A price anchor, not a voice tool.

BookTranslator.ai, Immersive Translate, Rask

booktranslator.ai from $5.99 per 100k words (unverified) · immersivetranslate.com free tier, Pro ≈ $9.99/month · rask.ai free tool

Upload an EPUB, pick a language, download an EPUB with the layout intact; Immersive adds bilingual side-by-side reading and lets you choose among 18 engines; Rask is a free web tool that says it “preserves your voice” without taking anything of yours. All three are reading tools: for a reader who wants a book they can't otherwise read, they are the right answer. None has any notion of a translator's voice.

For reading, not for publishing.

DeepL, Phrase, Smartcat

subscriptions from ≈ $9/user/month (DeepL) and $27/month (Phrase) to $1,200+/year (Smartcat) and ≈ $1,245/month (Phrase Custom AI)

The professional translation stack. All three accept a translation memory (.tmx) built from your past work and a glossary; DeepL's newer plans add “Style Rules”, tone instructions typed as text; Phrase Custom AI will train an engine on your cleaned memories, for a team-sized fee. A memory is precise where it hits and silent where it doesn't: it matches the same sentence, or a close one, and a novel repeats sentences about as often as a person does. Good at contracts and manuals; not built to carry a voice into sentences it has never seen.

Sentence memory, not voice. Excellent for what it is for.

Lilt and Lara (ModernMT)

Lilt: enterprise quotes · Lara: reported $9.99 to €25/month plus usage, unverified · ModernMT retires end of 2026

Adaptive machine translation: the engine learns from each correction you confirm, so the next similar segment benefits. This is the closest thing in the industry to “it learns from your edits”, and it has been sold to enterprises for years. It lives inside a CAT tool, segment by segment, and is priced and shaped for localisation teams rather than for a translator with one novel and a past book.

The right idea, for a different customer.

Nuanxed, and a human translator

quotes only · humans in the loop · weeks, not minutes

Nuanxed drafts with AI and finishes with professional translators, editors and proofreaders, for publishers, at around fifty books a month by their own account. A freelance literary translator does the same by hand; the only sourced figure we have for a novel is TranslateABook's ≈ €7,500 and five weeks. Both give you a voice: theirs. Own Words is not a replacement for either; it is the draft a translator starts from, in their own register, at a price that leaves the rest of the fee for the part only a person can do.

The benchmark, not the competition.

IV
Our own number

How we measure ourselves.

Every product above describes its quality in adjectives: “publication-ready”, “98% ready”, “preserves your voice”. We use one number: the share of words a working translator changes before a drafted paragraph is hers. Held to the same standard as the table above:

Book101,525 words, a working literary translator, in progress
Voice sourceOne past book of hers, original and finished translation, aligned paragraph by paragraph
Models measured16, on the same paragraphs, with the same examples, scored against her final text
ResultThe cheapest strong model within noise of the most expensive. So the free pages and the paid book use the same model, and there is no “pro model” tier.
Draft latency1.6 s median per paragraph
Model cost, whole novel≈ $10 to draft; the launch price is $25, and we say so on the price
The number itselfPublished when early access opens, with the method early access
Not claimed“It gets closer as you work.” Nobody has measured it, including us; when we have, it goes on the honesty clause. not claimed
Honesty clause

The prices and features above are what the products' own pages showed on 2026-09-26, read by us, not tested by us. Three figures (Lara's price; BookTranslate.ai's upper tiers; BookTranslator.ai's price) came from summaries rather than a price page and are marked unverified. Our own figures are measured on one book and one translator, and the number is not yet published. If we have something wrong, write to hello@own-words.pro and we will fix it and date the fix.

V
Sources

Where the figures come from.

  1. TranslateABook, its own comparison of AI book-translation services and price calculator.
  2. Jane Friedman, on GlobeScribe's pricing.
  3. The Bookseller, on the GlobeScribe launch.
  4. Publishers Weekly, on Nuanxed.
  5. machinetranslate.org, adaptive machine translation.
  6. ModernMT, Lara pricing.
  7. BookTranslator.app, a guide to book translation.

Plus the product pages linked in the table, each read on 2026-09-26.

Ten pages, in your words, before you decide anything.

Ask for early access

Bring one book you translated and the next one you have to. No card. No subscription. A reply from a person.