Show HN: Zenòdot – Find if a book has been translated into your language

AusiasTsel 11 points 10 comments March 09, 2026
www.zenodot.app · View on Hacker News

I'm a multilingual reader (Catalan/Spanish/English/Italian), and I kept hitting the same wall: I'd hear about a book and have no way to know if it existed in my language. Turns out this is a genuinely unsolved problem. There's no single database that tracks which books have been translated into which languages. ISBN registries are fragmented by country. Open Library has great English coverage but gaps elsewhere. Wikidata has surprisingly rich translation data but it's locked behind SPARQL. Google Books is inconsistent across regions. So I built Zenòdot to cross all four and piece the picture together. What I found building it: -The ISBN system is far more broken than I expected. ISBNdb has millions of English records but almost nothing for languages like Basque, Icelandic, or Bengali. Books exist in these languages, they just don't exist in the databases. -Wikidata was the biggest surprise. It has structured translation data for thousands of works, but extracting it requires SPARQL queries, title resolution across scripts (try matching a book title in Chinese to its English original), and author alias caching. Hard to build, but the results fill gaps that no other source covers. -The most interesting output isn't what the tool finds; it's what it doesn't find. When someone searches for a book in a language and there's no result, that's a demand signal. "Someone in the world wanted this translation and it doesn't exist." That data could be genuinely useful to publishers. The tool prioritizes your selected languages, so it shows you editions relevant to you first. The philosophy is "documentary infrastructure”: no recommendations, no social features, no accounts. You search, you find (or don't), you go buy the book wherever you want. Stack: Next.js 15 (App Router), Supabase, Vercel, TypeScript. Solo project, no funding, about 4 months of work. If you're multilingual or learning a language, I'd especially love your feedback. Try searching for a book you love and switching between languages, that's where the tool shows its value.

Discussion Highlights (3 comments)

MonkeyIsNull

wow, ok. I definitely need this! This is my life now with French, Russian, German and whatever language of the moment I am messing around with. However, it stills looks like it's tied to localhost? I get a web socket error (to localhost:8081) and when I type the name of the title into the search title. Nothing happens and the button doesn't look like I can click it (no highlighting)

zufallsheld

Do you know https://annas-archive.gl/isbn-visualization/ ? And https://search.worldcat.org/ ? They could probably help you with your dataset.

mosbyllc

It's a website that solves a real need, great. I tried it out, it's overall good, just the purchase options link for buying doesn't seem quite right; I tried bookshop, betterworldbooks, and amazon, but none of them could directly link to the book search page. But overall, it's interesting and useful. I also made a [book quote finder]( https://www.aimoviequotes.com/quote-finder/quote-finder-in-b... ) before, I'm a beginner at development but it was quite rough, I still have a lot to learn.

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