LectuLibre Builds AI Pipeline to Handle Idioms and Cultural References in Book Translation

AI-powered book translation startup LectuLibre developed a three-stage pipeline to address the challenge of translating idioms, metaphors, and culturally loaded phrases that standard machine translation handles poorly. The system, built in Python, first uses DeepSeek to detect non-standard language in each sentence, then calls Claude 3.5 Sonnet to generate a contextual translation along with a plain-language meaning explanation. A third stage presents the results to users, who can confirm, edit, or request a fresh translation before the text is finalised. The pipeline runs asynchronously inside a FastAPI backend, with the two-model approach chosen to balance cost and accuracy across potentially hundreds of thousands of words per book. The feature aims to preserve the literary intent of source texts rather than producing literal but misleading word-for-word renderings.