The old way
$3,000–$10,000
- Per book, per language
- Months of waiting, one language at a time
- Out of reach for most midlist and backlist titles
- Your voice in a stranger’s hands
Built by a working author, for working authors
Project Arachne
Your books. Twenty-nine languages. Still your voice.
Arachne turns one clean manuscript into carefully reviewed translations your overseas readers can actually love — for $50 a book, plus model fees on your own API keys. No agencies. No per-word quotes. No waiting a year per language.
A Cassie Alexander Studios project.
The math your rights inbox never shows you
Every language you skip is a market you never meet.
With Arachne
$50 per book, once — or 10 books for $399, 30 for $899
- Translate that book into any or all of 29 languages
- Model fees billed straight to your own OpenAI & Anthropic keys — you see every cent
- Days, not months — jobs run on Arachne’s server while you sleep
- Your style sheet, your glossary, your rulings — your voice
Bringing a backlist? Bundle up.
1 book
$50
test the waters
save 20%
10 books
$399
$39.90 a book
save 40%
30 books
$899
under $30 a book
Slots never expire — feed your catalog through at your own pace. Sitting on 50+ books, or running a press? Email us — we like big catalogs.
Provider fees vary with book length and model choices and are billed by your own accounts. Arachne never stores your keys.
Built for authors, not engineers
One careful path from manuscript to reviewed files.
Upload a clean DOCX
Bring the manuscript text you actually want translated. Remove backmatter, ads, and signup pages unless you want them translated too.
Approve the style sheet
Arachne drafts a project style sheet, glossary, voice profiles, canon facts, title notes, and a locked dossier before translation starts. You approve every page of it.
Use your own keys
OpenAI and Anthropic keys are pasted per job. They are sent only to that worker process and are never saved to your account.
Review the final choices
Translation runs continue on the Arachne server. When the work is done, you preview and download the selected final markdown.
Idioms, voice, and continuity
The point is not word-by-word translation. The point is carried meaning.
Arachne builds a project style sheet before translation so jokes, insults, endearments, recurring phrases, heat level, and character voice have context.
When an idiom does not survive literally, Arachne looks for the target-language move that carries the same emotional and narrative job.
Refrains and callbacks are locked so a line that repeats in chapter two and chapter forty repeats exactly in translation, too.
Approved glossary, voice, canon, and translation lessons carry forward to later books in the same series — every book teaches the next one.
Language defaults matter
Arachne does not treat every language like English with different words.
Spanish is aimed at broadly readable Latin American Spanish, with a Mexican-friendly center of gravity.
Arabic uses generalized Modern Standard Arabic and preserves right-to-left script behavior.
Every language gets its own handling for script, punctuation, formality, and reader expectations, from right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew to CJK layout, Romance-language register, and Brazilian Portuguese market norms.
29 languages
Available language lanes.
Every lane gets its own rules for script, register, and reader expectations — and every book that moves through a lane teaches it. These are the current target languages.
Arabic (ar)
Czech (cs)
Danish (da)
German (de)
Greek (el)
Spanish (es)
Finnish (fi)
French (fr)
Hebrew (he)
Hindi (hi)
Hungarian (hu)
Indonesian (id)
Italian (it)
Japanese (ja)
Korean (ko)
Dutch (nl)
Norwegian (no)
Polish (pl)
Brazilian Portuguese (pt_br)
Romanian (ro)
Russian (ru)
Slovak (sk)
Swedish (sv)
Thai (th)
Turkish (tr)
Ukrainian (uk)
Vietnamese (vi)
Simplified Chinese (zh_cn)
Traditional Chinese (zh_tw)
Receipts, not promises
Real books. Real readers. Real reviews.
★★★★★
Czech editions rated five stars by native readers on Google Play
20+
Working indie authors ran books through Arachne in its beta year
29
Languages, each with its own rules for script, register, and voice
★ 4.7 average from Czech readers on Google Play
My Czech editions of a romance trilogy average 4.7 stars from real readers. They’re rating the storytelling — they have no idea how the translation was made, and they don’t need to. — Cassie
And Czech does not forgive translation software. Seven grammatical cases. Verbs and adjectives that change their endings with the speaker’s gender — one wrong ending and your heroine mis-genders herself mid-scene. A formal-vs-intimate “you” (vykání/tykání) that has to track the temperature of every relationship as it changes. Free word order that carries the emphasis English does with italics. Negation that stacks instead of cancelling. Czech eats translation software for breakfast — and Arachne walked out with a 4.7.
EN → FR → EN the round-trip test — translated back blind, zero human edits
Anyone can claim their French edition reads beautifully — and unless you read French, you can’t check. So here’s a test you can judge: Arachne translated this passage — the opening of Dragon Called — into French, then a second, completely separate run translated that French back into English — without ever seeing the original. Whatever survives two full trips through the wormhole is what the engine actually preserves.
What she wrote
While waiting for the bus, Andrea Ngo—Andi—had plenty of time to consider that answering an Overnight Help Wanted ad online may not have been the world’s best idea. But it wasn’t like her student loans were going to pay themselves; she was already working nights at the county hospital—and then there was the whole thing with her idiot brother’s bail. Danny had gotten into stupid situations before, but she never thought he’d run out on her, miss his court date, and leave her stuck with a ten-thousand-dollar bail bond.
What Arachne made in French
En attendant le bus, Andrea Ngo — Andi — avait eu largement le temps de se dire que répondre à une annonce en ligne pour un poste de nuit n’était peut-être pas l’idée du siècle. Mais ce n’était pas comme si ses prêts étudiants allaient se rembourser tout seuls ; elle travaillait déjà de nuit à l’hôpital public — et puis il y avait toute cette histoire avec la caution de son crétin de frère. Danny s’était déjà fourré dans des situations stupides, mais jamais elle n’aurait imaginé qu’il la planterait, ne se présenterait pas à l’audience, et la laisserait avec une caution de dix mille dollars sur les bras.
What came back — translated blind from the French
Waiting for the bus, Andrea Ngo—Andi—had had plenty of time to tell herself that answering an online posting for a night job might not have been the idea of the century. But it wasn’t like her student loans were going to pay themselves off; she already worked nights at the public hospital—and then there was the whole mess with her idiot brother’s bail. Danny had gotten himself into stupid situations before, but she never would have imagined he’d bail on her, skip his court hearing, and leave her holding a ten-thousand-dollar bond.
Round-tripped through two full translations. No human edits between. That’s how much survives — same skeleton, same rhythm, same voice, and the return leg even lands a bail/bail pun the original didn’t have. German ran the same gauntlet and brought the first sentence of Dragons Don’t Date back word-for-word identical; Spanish, Italian, Czech, Polish, Japanese, and even Chinese ran it too. See all eight round-trips →
“Cassie’s Project Arachne translation tool is amazing! It’s given me the opportunity to translate my books into more languages than I could ever have hoped for and I’m blown away by the quality of the work.”
— Arachne author
“Arachne is fantastic. I’m getting incredibly high-quality translations of my books at about 2% the cost of what it was to have them translated by humans, and the translations are ready within hours instead of months. Thank you for making Arachne available — this is a gamechanger!”
— Arachne author
“I read it cover to cover, specifically hunting for failure. I didn’t find it. I found a translation making choices — slamming a door made of grammar that English doesn’t even have.”
— Claude Fable 5, Anthropic’s frontier model, after auditing the full Slovak edition of Dragon Called line by line against the English
What to know before you start.
Bring the right file
Use a DOCX that contains only the manuscript text you want translated. Remove backmatter, ads, signup copy, and unrelated bonus material unless those should be translated too.
Use your own provider keys
Arachne asks for OpenAI and Anthropic keys only when launching a live job. Keys are job-scoped and are not saved in project history.
Start with a test chunk
Run one representative chunk first to estimate cost, inspect voice, and make sure the book’s style sheet is doing what you expect.
Queue, then come back
Once a translation job starts, it keeps running on the Arachne server. Closing the laptop does not stop the job. Revoking the provider key is the emergency brake.
Pay per book, not per language
The paid unit is one book workspace: $50, once. Your workspace keeps that book’s dossier and memory so you can return later and run more languages with your own keys.
Start tonight
Your readers are already waiting in their own language.
Sign in with your email, open a book workspace, and launch your first translation before you finish your coffee.
Open the app