Zenòdot
Find if a book has been translated into your language
Details
- External ID
- 47310717
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Zenòdot
- Website domain
- zenodot.app
- Launched
- March 9, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 15
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6845018450184502
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche data tools and novelty websites
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- find book translations in your language
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The UI and search interfaces are simple, but aggregating a comprehensive, accurate multilingual translation catalog across global publishers is a major proprietary data aggregation challenge.
What it would actually take: The product requires a massive data aggregation pipeline crawling national library databases (WorldCat, ISBN agencies, OpenLibrary, Wikidata) and retail APIs across multiple countries to resolve works to their various translated editions. The difficult aspect is deduplication and entity matching: mapping varied local titles and translator credits back to a canonical original work across dozens of languages. It requires sophisticated entity-resolution algorithms and extensive web scrapers to build the underlying translation catalog.
Discussion
11 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Anna's Archive ISBN visualization, WorldCat, Wikidata
Concerns raised: Purchase links don't direct to specific edition pages, only store searches, React hydration mismatch causing search functionality to break, Incomplete ISBN coverage, especially for non-English books, Language selector not fully switching UI text
Feature requests: Integrate WorldCat for translation discovery, Direct product URLs to specific book editions across stores, Better non-English and translation coverage
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 47 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #19 of 48 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 124 days after the earliest competitor.
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- DualBook · ph · 2026-09-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.