Is there a worldwide database of book translations?

Why nobody can tell you whether a book exists in your language

We have mapped every street on the planet. We have sequenced the human genome. And yet, if you want to know whether a particular book exists in a particular language, nobody can tell you.

I found this out the ordinary way. I wanted to know whether a book I loved existed in my language, Catalan/Valencian. In Spanish the answer took one search. In my own language it took a search engine, an online shop, a bookseller's site, and then nothing — not a no, just a place where the road ended. I told that story in full for MIDAS. The dead end isn't mine. Every reader, in every language, hits it somewhere.

Zenòdot is the largest actively maintained open catalogue of book translations, built by correlating more than 50 bibliographic sources (here's how it searches). It is also incomplete by definition: it only sees what some library, somewhere, has catalogued and opened. It is worth building anyway.

Why there was no worldwide database of translations

Not because nobody thought of it. Because nobody was ever responsible for it.

Every national library catalogues what is published in its own territory. Every bookshop lists what it can sell. Every publisher knows its own backlist. Each record is careful, and each one stops at its own border. The question "in which languages does this book exist?" falls exactly between them. It is nobody's job, so no catalogue answers it.

What happened to the Index Translationum

The closest thing the world had was UNESCO's Index Translationum, fed for decades by national agencies until most of them stopped. In 2025 UNESCO released it as open data, and Zenòdot now folds it in as one more source. We don't replace it; we are its respectful heir.

Minoritized languages: invisible, not missing

For a reader in a language minoritized in the publishing market — Basque, Sámi, Breton, Catalan/Valencian — the books are there. You just can't see them. A translation published by a small press thirty years ago, catalogued only by one regional library, is where the road ends.

When a catalogue looks across all those records at once, a reader can see, for the first time, what is actually within reach in their language.

One caution: what Zenòdot shows for any language is a map of which catalogues have been opened, not a measure of the literature that exists. Where a language looks thin, the gap is ours to close.

Dominant languages just notice it less

Readers of English, French or Spanish assume their languages are fully documented. They are — inside their own markets. Ask what has reached English from Georgian, or Tamil, or Catalan/Valencian, and the big catalogues struggle too. They are thorough about what their own industry sells, and thin about everything that arrived from elsewhere.

Writers, and the people who publish them

Writers are often the last to know where their own books have gone: into languages they don't read, from presses they never dealt with, recorded in catalogues they would never think to search. For everything recorded somewhere, a writer can now see, in one place, the languages their work has reached. An editor weighing a translation can see the same thing before deciding.

Why it has to be open

A catalogue like this is infrastructure, and infrastructure for reading shouldn't sit behind a paywall. Searching it is free, and will stay free.

The road still ends somewhere. The difference is that now someone is responsible for how far it goes.

Frequently asked questions