How LectuLibre Built a Chunking System to Translate Full Books via Claude API
AI book translation platform LectuLibre discovered that the primary engineering challenge was not translation quality but Claude API's output token limits, which cap responses at around 4,096 tokens — far short of a full book's 120,000 tokens. To work around this, the team built a paragraph- and sentence-aware text chunking system that splits source content into manageable segments of up to 8,000 tokens each. An overlap of roughly 200 tokens between consecutive chunks preserves narrative context and reduces translation errors at boundaries. The system uses the tiktoken library for token counting and supports parallel processing of chunks to minimize user wait times. The approach also handles common PDF and EPUB extraction issues such as headers, footers, and chapter structures.
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