It started with a book I couldn't read.

Hi, I'm Dott. Before I'm a developer, I'm a reader.

For almost every problem I've run into in life, the answer was already sitting in a book. So I read a lot, a hundred hours a year, sometimes two hundred.

And the same thing kept happening. I'd fall for a book that had never been translated into my native language Chinese. So I did what every reader does: I waited. Every few months I'd go looking for a translation and come up empty. Most books never get translated at all, and the lucky few take years to arrive.

So I took the hard way out, though "lucky" is closer to the truth. I already read English well enough to get by. But well enough has a cost: I've never read as fast in English as I do in my own language. A book that takes me a week in Chinese can take much longer in English. The door opened, but the price of admission was absurd. And I was one of the lucky ones, but nobody should have to learn an entire language just to read a book they love, least of all now, when AI has made translation, for all practical purposes, a solved problem.

I don't think the language a book was written in should decide who gets to read it.

So I built BookTranslator. You give it a book in a language you can't read, and it gives you back the whole thing in one you can.

The technology was already there; someone just had to build it. I built it for me, but I wasn't the only one waiting.