How to translate a book in a foreign language purchased on Kindle?
There are so many books not translated into French that if you don’t speak the language, you won’t have access to them.
Recently, I wanted to read some Japanese books, and despite my research, not only were they not translated into English, but the ebook version wasn’t available on Amazon France, Amazon US, or Google Play.
- So what I did was go on Amazon to buy the ebooks
- Then I downloaded Kindle for PC version 1.17 (other versions won’t work) and registered my Amazon account. Be careful: when registering the account, you need to select the store of the country where you created your Amazon account.
- I download the books on my Kindle for PC (very important)
- Then I use the free software PDFMATE ebook converter to convert my Kindle book to .epub format. If you can convert it directly to .docx with another tool, great, but PDFMate doesn’t allow that, so I first convert it to epub. The epub format preserves the layout as well as the illustrations, so it’s better to use this format. Screenshots of these steps can be found on my other blog
- I use an online tool https://www.onlineconverter.com/epub-to-docx to convert the .epub file to .docx. The .docx format keeps the layout and can be used for translation, so we’ll keep this format.
- I then use DeepL https://www.deepl.com/translator.html# to convert my Japanese .docx file to French .docx. The first two documents are free; afterward, you need to pay about €8 for 5 translated documents. To read them on my reMarkable for example, I save the .docx as .pdf and I can read them without any problem. For Kindle, you can use the .docx as is (I’ve already explained how to put files on Kindle here)
Here is the result: Kindle version vs. translated version. I don’t speak Japanese, so I can’t judge the quality of the translation, but the essential message is there. There are a few weird phrases, but we understand well.
However, there are some parts that cannot be translated because they are in image format and the text cannot be selected on Kindle either.
For these pages, I use the Google Translate app on my phone, which scans the image and translates it instantly.
