EPUB Reader With Translation: How to Read a Book You Own

Say you have a novel in Spanish on your phone, an EPUB file, and you search for an "EPUB translator". You'll find two kinds of tool under that name. One turns the book into a book in your language, and the other leaves the book in Spanish and helps you read it.

If you only want the story, use the first kind. If you're learning Spanish, use the second. The rest of this article is about how to make that work: what to check before you start, where to find EPUBs in the language you're learning, and how to read one without giving up on page three.

Is there an EPUB translator?

Yes, and the name covers two kinds of tool. A whole-book translator turns the EPUB into a book in your language, and a reader with translation keeps the book in its own language and translates only what you select.

Whole-book translators take the EPUB and machine-translate all of it. You get a new file in your language, or a bilingual one where each paragraph of the original is followed by its translation.

Readers with translation open the original and translate only the word or phrase you select. The page stays in the language you're learning, and you look things up as you go.

With a full translation next to the text, it's easy to read the language you already know and only glance at the other one. You'll follow the story, but most of the reading happens in your own language. With a reader, every sentence is in the new language, and the translation is there only for the gaps.

A bilingual file isn't useless. If a page is far too hard, seeing the whole paragraph translated can get you through it. But if you need that on every page, the book is too hard for you right now, and an easier one will teach you more. There's more on that in how to know when to level up.

Can you translate an EPUB for free?

For a sentence or a page at a time, yes: Google Play Books translates text you select in an EPUB you've uploaded, and the steps are further down. For the whole book, a free tool still has to do something with your text, so read its privacy terms before you upload the file.

Unless it runs on your own device, a whole-book translator sends the entire text of the book to an online translation service and builds the new file from what comes back. What happens to your book after that depends on that service's terms, and the terms can differ a lot between the free and the paid version of the same service.

DeepL is a good example. It doesn't take EPUB files itself (its privacy policy lists .docx, .pptx and .pdf for the free translator), but the same policy shows the difference. It says it processes what you upload to the free version "for a limited period of time to train and improve our neural networks and algorithms." With a paid Pro account, the texts are deleted once the translation is done and are not used to improve its services (DeepL privacy policy). If a whole-book tool doesn't say which service it uses or what it keeps, you have no way to know which of those your book gets.

The file also has to be DRM-free, whatever tool you use. That's the first thing to check, and the section on DRM below explains how.

Why reading the original with translations works

Language researchers call a short translation or definition next to a word in a text a gloss, and it has been studied for decades.

In one study from 1996, advanced Dutch students of French read a French short story in one of three ways: with translations of the unknown words in the margin, with a bilingual dictionary, or with no help. Seeing a word three times instead of once helped the students learn it more when they had the margin translations or the dictionary than when they had no help. Without either, the authors write, readers often ignore unknown words or guess their meaning wrong, so meeting a word again does less for them (Hulstijn, Hollander & Greidanus, 1996).

A 2020 review of 42 studies found the same thing on a larger scale. On tests right after reading, learners who read with glosses knew about 45% of the new words on average, against about 27% for learners who read without them. Glosses in the reader's own language worked better than glosses in the language being learned (Yanagisawa, Webb & Uchihara, 2020).

The studies tested many kinds of gloss, on paper and on screen, not any particular app, so they don't tell you what one app will do for you. None of them says to look up every word, either. What they found is that a translation at the moment you need it helps you learn the word, and you still do the reading yourself.

First, check that you can open the file

Before anything else, find out whether your EPUB has DRM. DRM is copy protection added to ebooks; Kobo's help page says it "helps protect eBooks from unauthorized sharing" (Kobo). A DRM-protected book needs software that is allowed to unlock it, such as the store's own app, or Adobe Digital Editions, which Kobo's page says you may need for library loans and for DRM-protected books from other stores. An app that imports your own files can't unlock it.

That decides which tools you can use:

• A DRM-free EPUB can be imported into any reading app that takes EPUB files.
• A DRM-protected EPUB, such as a library loan, stays in the apps that can unlock it.
• Kindle books stay in Kindle. If that's where your books are, is a Kindle good for learning a language? goes through what Kindle's own dictionary and Vocabulary Builder can do.

If you're buying a book to read in another app, check before you pay whether the store sells that edition DRM-free.

Where can you find EPUBs in the language you're learning?

Project Gutenberg has thousands of free ebooks in French, Finnish and German, and hundreds in Spanish and Portuguese. For newer books, look for shops that sell DRM-free editions.

Project Gutenberg is the obvious start. It's a free library of more than 75,000 ebooks, with EPUB downloads, and it isn't only English. In October 2026 its language list showed 4,009 books in French, 3,403 in Finnish, 2,355 in German, 1,071 in Italian, 1,054 in Dutch, 891 in Spanish and 647 in Portuguese (Project Gutenberg).

Two things to know about it:

• The books are free because they are out of copyright in the United States. Project Gutenberg says that if you live elsewhere, you should check the law where you are before you download (Project Gutenberg license).
• Out of copyright also means old, and a novel from 1860 is written in the language of 1860, not the language you're learning to speak. Read the classics without the archaic language has more on that problem.

For newer books, look for shops and publishers that sell DRM-free editions, and check the book's page before you buy.

Which ebook reader has a built-in translator?

Google Play Books has one: on Android, you can select text in an EPUB you've uploaded and choose Translate. Reading apps made for language learners, such as Simply Fluent, also translate what you select, and keep the translations you save.

You may not need a new app to start. Google Play Books lets you upload your own EPUB files and read them on any device you sign in to (Google). In a book, you touch and hold to select text, then choose Translate and pick the two languages. Google's help page gives those steps for the Android app (Google).

That works well for the odd sentence. What it doesn't do is remember. The next time the same word comes up, fifty pages later, you look it up again. That was what stopped me the first time I tried to read a book in Dutch. It was Harry Potter on paper, with Google Translate on my phone, and I gave up after a couple of pages. I kept looking up the same words again, sometimes on the very next page.

Reading it in Simply Fluent

You import the EPUB, and the app detects the book's language. You select a word or phrase you don't know and see all its meanings, with the one it has in that sentence highlighted. If you save the translation, it's shown in small text above that word or phrase on every page you read after, in that book and every other book in that language, so you don't look the same word up twice. The translations you save also become your flashcards.

It takes EPUB, TXT and Markdown files, and PDF with Premium. DRM-protected files can't be imported. The free version can import one book; Premium has no limit, and everyone starts with a 30-day free trial.

How to read an EPUB without giving up

Whichever tool you use, these make it easier to keep going:

1. Pick a book you can mostly follow. If you're looking up more than a word or two in every sentence, you're decoding, not reading. How to pick your first book goes through what to look for.
2. Look up what stops you, and skip what doesn't. A word you can guess, or one that doesn't change what's happening, can wait. You don't have to understand every word.
3. Look up the words that keep coming back. A word you've seen three times in a chapter will come up again, so it's worth looking up.
4. Read in short, regular sessions, so the story and its words are still fresh when you open the book again.

Open the book, read the first page, and count how many words stop you. If it's more than a word or two in most sentences, an easier book will teach you more for now.