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

📰 Hacker News · AusiasTsel

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 work

Published 9 Mar 2026
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