Translation Studio

What it does

A general translation tool renders each sentence on its own, which works until the sentence contains a word a dictionary has never seen: the name you invented for your protagonist, the city she rules, the order of knights she belongs to, the curse word her people use. A plain translator treats each of those the way it treats any other noun. It guesses, and it guesses differently every time it meets them.

Translation Studio is the part of StoryHelm that knows those words are yours. Before it renders a single line, it reads your Canon: the characters, places, factions, and items StoryHelm has already cataloged from your manuscript. Then it produces the translation with those names held to one consistent form, the form you chose, every time they appear. Eldermoor stays Eldermoor in chapter two and chapter forty. The Silver Vow is the Silver Vow on every page that names it, not the Silver Oath, not the Argent Pledge.

It keeps three kinds of detail stable that ordinary translation lets drift:

• Character and place names: Helen is Helen across the whole book, not Helene in one chapter and Elena in the next; the harbor town keeps the spelling you decided on.
• Invented terms and proper nouns: the name of a spell, a coin, a god, or a guild stays fixed instead of being re-translated from scratch each time it surfaces.
• Series consistency: because the studio reads the same Canon your earlier books were analyzed against, Book Four's German edition speaks the same names as Book One's.

You decide how each name should read

Some authors want a name left exactly as written. Others want it adapted so it reads naturally to a Spanish or Japanese reader. Translation Studio surfaces the choice instead of deciding silently: you can pin a name to its original form, give it a preferred rendering in the target language, and that decision then holds for every appearance in the manuscript. The Canon it reads from is the same one the Story Bible is built on, so the names it protects are the names you already curated.

An example

Here is the drift Translation Studio is built to prevent: an invented place name rendered three different ways by a translator that never learned it was a proper noun.