Now in beta · Help us shape the app. Become a beta customer →
Doodle Dragon Studio

Translate your book into another language

Add a second language to a project, translate the cover and pages, record narration for it, and export it — without disturbing the English original.

4 min read

Studio Plus

  1. Finish the English first

    Get the words the way you want them before you translate. Editing English afterwards marks every affected page Needs review, and updating those pages with AI costs credits again.

    Pictures, layout, and page order are shared across languages, so those you can keep changing freely.

    Tip. A five-minute proofread of the English now is cheaper than re-translating six pages later.

  2. Add a language

    Open the project’s language screen and add one of the available languages: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Japanese, or Korean.

    English stays as the original. Adding a language does not translate anything yet — it creates an empty layer for you to fill.

  3. Translate the cover and pages

    Translate the whole book in one request. The app sends only the English cover title, subtitle, footer, and page text, plus the language you chose — never your artwork, photos, recordings, or family names.

    Pages that already have a current translation are skipped, so you are not charged to redo work that is already done.

    Tip. Cost is 1 credit per page or cover, with a 5-credit minimum and a 15-credit maximum. A cover plus six pages is 7 credits; a whole book is never more than 15.

  4. Or write it yourself

    You do not have to use AI. Type the translation directly, or copy the English across as a starting point and work over it. Both are local, free, and never contact a translation service.

    For a language you actually speak, this is usually the better book.

  5. Read it back and fix what's off

    Machine translation gets rhyme, wordplay, and names for pets and toys wrong more often than it gets plain sentences wrong. Read the translated pages aloud before you record them — that is when awkward phrasing shows up.

    Edit any translated page directly. Your edits are saved against the current English.

  6. Record narration for the new language

    Each language has its own narration. Record yourself, import a file so a relative can be the voice, or generate one — none of it touches the English recording already on the page.

    Tip. This is the reason to do it at all. A grandparent reading in their own language, on the same pictures, is the whole point.

  7. Export one language at a time

    Choose the language on the export screen, then export a PDF, a video, or subtitles. Page timing follows that language’s narration, so pages stay on screen for as long as the words take.

    Export is blocked while any page is still untranslated. If pages are translated but stale, the app asks you to confirm and uses your translated wording rather than dropping English into the middle of the book.

When the English changes later

You will edit the English eventually. When you do, the translation is not deleted and not silently replaced. The page is marked Needs review, because the app remembers which version of the English that translation was approved against.

For each flagged page you pick one of three things:

Edit the translation yourself — fix the wording by hand and save it against the new English. Free.

Update from the latest English — regenerate that page with AI and review the result. This clears that page’s old translated narration, so a recording is never left attached to words it no longer matches. You will need to record that page again.

Keep the current translation — if you only fixed a typo or changed a comma, the existing wording is probably still fine. Keeping it preserves its narration.

Updating a page costs its narration Choosing Update from the latest English deliberately discards that page’s translated narration. That is the safe behaviour — mismatched audio is worse than no audio — but if you have already recorded a relative reading the book, prefer editing the text by hand so the recording survives.

What travels with the project

Reordering pages keeps every language layer attached to its page. Deleting a page deletes its translations along with it.

A .ddstory archive keeps every language and its narration links, so you can hand the whole multilingual project to another device and carry on. Cover title, subtitle, and footer are translated per language; the author or family name stays shared as attribution.

If something looks wrong

Translated text is generated by an AI model and reviewed by you, not by us. Read it before you export, especially names, places, and anything rhyming. See how your data is used with AI for exactly what is sent.