Writing the book is the hard part. Translating it used to be the second hard part — a translator per language, a layout rebuilt per language, a cost that only made sense for publishers.

In AnyTale you write the book once and press a button nineteen times. One story becomes nineteen books, each one readable by a child who does not speak a word of your language. Translation costs one token per 1,000 words, and a short picture book often fits into a single token per language.

What this is actually worth

If you are selling your books, a translation is not a copy — it is a new product for a new market. The same story you already finished can be listed in Spanish, German, Polish and Swedish, and each listing reaches readers who would never have found the English one. The work is already done; the translation is a few tokens and a few minutes.

If you made the book for one particular child, it means the grandmother in another country can read it too, in her own language, from the same book you made.

Either way the economics are the same: the expensive part — the story, the characters, the illustrations — is written once and reused nineteen times over.

Where to find it

Open the Book menu in the top-left corner of the Editor and choose Add translations. The flag beside it shows the language your book is in right now.

The Book Translations dialog tells you three things before any list of languages:

Original language — what the book was written in, and what every translation is made from.
Cost — one token per 1,000 words of text.
Your token balance — so you know what translating four languages costs before you start.

Above the grid, three counters track progress: All, Translated and Available. On a book you have never translated they read 19, 0 and 19.

The 19 languages available today

Each language appears as a card with its English name and its own name. Press Translate and it is added to your book.

How many languages you can add depends on your plan: 3 on Starter, 10 on Creator, and all of them on Master Pro.

Region	Languages
Western Europe	Spanish (Español), French (Français), German (Deutsch), Italian (Italiano), Portuguese (Português), Dutch (Nederlands)
Nordics	Swedish (Svenska), Norwegian (Norsk), Danish (Dansk), Finnish (Suomi)
Central Europe	Polish (Polski), Czech (Čeština), Hungarian (Magyar), Romanian (Română)
Baltics and Eastern Europe	Latvian (Latviešu), Lithuanian (Lietuvių), Estonian (Eesti), Ukrainian (Українська), Russian (Русский)

Together these cover most of Europe, plus the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world beyond it.

Coming soon: another 17 languages

We are adding a second wave, which takes the catalogue well past Europe:

Group	Languages
East Asia	Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean
Türkiye	Turkish
English variants	English (US) and English (UK) as separate options
The rest of Europe	Greek, Bulgarian, Slovak, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian
Middle East and South Asia	Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu

Two of these are worth a word of explanation.

Chinese comes in two versions on purpose. Simplified is read in mainland China and Singapore, Traditional in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. They are not interchangeable, and offering only one would leave a large audience reading something that looks wrong to them.

English will split into US and UK for the same reason. It is not only color and colour — it is spelling, punctuation and small grammatical habits that a reader notices immediately even when they cannot name them. Picking the right variant for the market you are selling into makes a book read as though it was written there.

Translation moves the words, not the pictures

Your illustrations stay exactly as they are. That is usually what you want — the art was expensive to generate and does not need redoing for a new language.

The thing to watch for is text that lives inside a picture rather than in a text box. A sign, a label, a title drawn into the illustration itself is part of the image, so a translation cannot reach it. If your book has any, plan to regenerate those images separately.

Expect the text to change length

Translated sentences are rarely the same length as the originals:

German and Finnish commonly run about a third longer than English. Text that filled its box exactly will overflow or shrink to fit.
Hungarian, Polish and Czech build long compound words that do not break neatly, so a narrow column can end up with awkward gaps.
Ukrainian and Russian also tend to run longer than English.

None of this breaks the translation. It means a page that was tight in the original is tight in a different way afterwards.

What to check after translating

Check	Why
Every page in Preview	The fastest way to spot text that has overflowed its box or collided with a character.
The cover and the title	Titles are short, so a change in length is proportionally very visible.
Text sitting over busy illustrations	A longer sentence may now extend into a dark part of the picture and stop being readable.
Names	Decide whether your hero keeps one name everywhere or takes a local one. Either works — the point is to choose rather than find out later.

Fixing any of these is ordinary text editing: select the box and adjust its size, the line spacing or the wording.

Tip: Translate one language first and read it through before buying the rest. Whatever you learn fixing that first version — a text box that is too tight, a title that needs room — almost always applies to the others, and correcting the original layout once is far quicker than repairing nineteen translations one by one.