The six-language edition—English, Italian, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and German—of my book *Algoritmi del Destino* (Algorithms of Destiny) is available now.
The English and Italian editions are available in both print and digital formats (for smartphones, TVs, PCs, Macs, laptops, tablets, etc.).
I would like to take this opportunity to once again praise Kindle Translate, the extraordinary service offered by KDP/Amazon for translating texts already published on the platform into various languages.
Kindle Translate is expanding its services and production speed at a rate almost matching my own… If I may be allowed a touch of gentle irony, I notice that in some respects, the US multinational simply cannot keep up with me…
Let me explain.
With the help of that other near-sci-fi trio—ChatGPT-6, Astra, and Work—I was ready a week ago to translate some of my books into Chinese and Korean; however, Amazon’s operational arm isn’t quite ready yet for print-on-paper production in those languages. So, I will wait patiently…
But there is another point I’d like to discuss—one that emerged, I believe, while I was attempting to publish my photojournalism book *Milano Fashion Week* in English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German.
I gave it a try, but the book didn’t pass the tests.
I must say that the Kindle Translate support team is very patient and always responds, even if not quickly (I imagine they are swamped with requests).
So, I sat down to read the platform’s various instruction documents, and I think I’ve figured out the reason.
Several of my books are photojournalism works: 90% or more consists of color photographs, with less than 10% written text.
The text is almost always in English, though in a few dozen of these books, I had also included a few pages of Italian translation. And this is likely where the system hit a snag: the AI ​​handling these automated translations—usually of very high quality—detected that the book was in English, then encountered three pages in Italian, and a red flag went up.
That’s understandable.
So, what did I do?
I modified the book’s source file, completely removing the three Italian pages. I then republished the book as a second edition, declaring it to be entirely in English, and it was accepted.
At that point, I also requested the Kindle version, and that went through successfully as well.
Only then—starting from the English Kindle edition, as per the instructions—did I request versions in French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and German. To my great surprise, the response I received was:
“Book not translatable!”
I reached out to Support again, and yesterday—three days later—I was told they needed another two or three days to explain what had happened.
There you have it.
As I was saying, things are moving so fast that sometimes the user gets ahead of the company, and the company has to huddle to figure out how to keep up…