Welcome to the Leanpub FAQ for our AI-powered book translation services!
Do I have to publish and sell my book and its translation(s) on Leanpub?
No, you don't have to publish the original book, or any of its translations, on Leanpub. You can just use Leanpub to translate the manuscript.
Can I publish and sell the translation(s) elsewhere, without sharing any writing credits or sales revenue with Leanpub?
Yes, you can sell the translations wherever else you want, without giving us a cut of the revenue.
My book manuscript is in Microsoft Word. Can I use TranslateAI to translate my book?
Yes, you can. There are two ways to ways to start with a Word manuscript and translate it on Leanpub:
1. Use our TranslateWord service. This is a "do it for me" service.
2. Use our PublishWord service and then use TranslateAI. This is mixture of "do it for me" and "do it myself".
3. Import your Word file and then use TranslateAI. This is a "do it yourself" service.
I have my book in EPUB format. Can I use TranslateAI to translate my book?
Yes, you can. There are two ways to ways to start with an EPUB file and translate it on Leanpub:
1. Use our TranslateEPUB service. This is a "do it for me" service.
2. Import your EPUB file and then use TranslateAI. This is a "do it yourself" service.
Can you explain what makes Leanpub's book translation process unique?
Leanpub's AI-powered translation is unique because we have our own plain text markup syntax for producing books, called "Markua", and GPT 4-o "knows" Markua.
In order to translate a book, we need a manuscript that is written in Markua, or that has been written some other way, and then converted to Markua.
If your book (like almost all books ever written!) is not in Markua, you can use one of our "do it for me" services to convert your manuscript into Markua, or you can use one of our "do it myself" services to import your manuscript into Leanpub and convert it into Markua.
Can I use TranslateAI to translate anything?
TranslateAI is currently only for books where you own the copyright.
It is meant to be used by self-published authors and by publishers or similar rights holders.
To be clear, that means you cannot use to translate books which are out of copyright.
Do I own the copyright to the AI translation(s)?
Questions of copyright are up to you to investigate based on your situation. We do not claim copyright ourselves over any translations produced using our AI services.
Does OpenAI use my manuscript for as training data for its models?
According to OpenAI, API usage is not used for training:
We translate books using GPT-4o via the OpenAI API, so according to their own documentation, that means your manuscript will not be used for training.
However, this comes with the same caveat as with the use of all third party services, which is that ultimately, we don't control what OpenAI does.
How does this all work?
Translating books is not as easy as going "Hey ChatGPT, translate my book!"
To learn a little bit about how this works, watch Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talk about Leanpub and TranslateAI here:
Can you give me any assurances about the quality of the translations?
Regarding the quality of our translations, the reports authors are getting from readers are typically surprise at how good the translation is, and reports that it's "good enough".
They do also hear from people about parts that could use improvement, and some authors are editing the translations in response to that kind of feedback.
Here are a couple of books with translations available for free, if you'd like to check them out (just scroll down the page to see the translations):
Can you give me some assurance that the translated text will not inadvertently saying something inappropriate?
We can't make 100% guarantees about the translation not including something inappropriate, but we've translated a number of books so far, and we've had no reports of inappropriate language.
Of course, the good thing about Leanpub books is that they can be updated easily and quickly in response to reader feedback, so if you did hear about something like this, it could be fixed promptly.
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