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

Source: Hacker News

Introduction

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

• ISBN system limitations – ISBNdb has millions of English records but almost nothing for languages like Basque, Icelandic, or Bengali. Books exist in these languages; they just aren’t represented in the databases.
• Wikidata surprise – It contains structured translation data for thousands of works, but extracting it requires SPARQL queries, title resolution across scripts (e.g., matching a Chinese title to its English original), and author‑alias caching. Hard to build, but the results fill gaps that no other source covers.
• Signal from missing data – The most interesting output isn’t what the tool finds; it’s what it doesn’t find. When a search for a book in a language returns no result, that indicates a demand signal: “Someone wanted this translation and it doesn’t exist.” This data could be genuinely useful to publishers.

How the Tool Works

• The tool prioritizes the languages you select, showing editions relevant to you first.
• Philosophy: documentary infrastructure – no recommendations, no social features, no accounts. You search, you find (or don’t), and you can buy the book wherever you want.

Stack

• Framework: Next.js 15 (App Router)
• Database: Supabase
• Hosting: Vercel
• Language: TypeScript

Solo project, no funding, about 4 months of work.

Call for Feedback

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.

Comments: (Points: 4, Comments: 6)