Translify is an AI reading companion for serious readers — students, researchers, prosumers, anyone who wants to read a book in a language they don't speak fluently and actually understand it.
We built it because the existing tools weren't quite right. The translation utilities — Google Translate, DeepL — hand you a translated file and call the job done. The AI study tools — NotebookLM, Mindgrasp — only work on documents already in your language. Neither group of tools is really thinking about the person sitting down with a foreign-language book and trying to understand it.
What we believe
Reading is comprehension, not decoding. Translating word-by-word — or even sentence-by-sentence — loses the thread of argument that makes a book worth reading in the first place. The point of reading Goethe is to understand what Goethe was actually saying, not just to know what each German word means in English.
Layout is meaning. A tabular comparison says something a paragraph cannot. A footnote next to its referent says something a footnote at the end of the document cannot. Reflowing a book to plain text — which most translation tools quietly do — is a kind of lossy compression we don't have to accept anymore.
The reader is the right unit of attention. We don't build for the publishing house (Amazon's Kindle Translate), for the language learner (Readlang, Beelinguapp), or for the casual web-page translator (Immersive Translate). We build for the person who has chosen this particular book and wants to read it well.
Why now
A few things came together in the last couple of years. Long-context language models — Claude, GPT-4o — can now hold an entire book in working memory and reason across it. Layout-preserving translation has crossed the quality bar for serious reading, at least in European languages. And vector databases got cheap and fast enough that doing real-time semantic retrieval over a book is no longer something you have to think about as an engineering problem.
You couldn't really build Translify in 2022. You can now. Upload the book. Read it in your language with the layout intact. Ask the book questions. Highlight a passage and get the AI to explain it. Quiz yourself on the chapter you just finished. None of this is novel in isolation. The novelty is putting all of it in one place, around the actual act of reading.
Who this is for
University students reading texts for class in a language they haven't mastered. Researchers reading primary sources in their original languages. Knowledge-worker prosumers reading the great European philosophers, the Japanese novelists, the Spanish-language essayists — in the language they were actually written. Polyglots who want a study tool, not a translation toy.
We are deliberately not for everyone. If you only need word lookups, Readlang costs $5 and does that well. If you need browser-wide translation, Immersive Translate has 10 million users for a reason. If you're a casual reader who picks up a translated paperback once a year, the existing supply chain is fine.
Translify is for when you've decided to read this specific book, and you want to understand it.
What we promise
- Your uploads are yours. Books you upload are encrypted at rest, never used to train any AI model, and permanently deletable at any time.
- No fake reviews. When we publish ratings, they link to a verifiable source.
- Cited answers, or none. When the chat or highlight-explain feature can't find a faithful source passage, it tells you instead of hallucinating one.
- Cancel any time, refund any time within 30 days. No retention forms. No "are you sure" loops. Reply to the welcome email, get a refund.
— The Translify team. Try it free for 14 days →