Author here. The piece is about bibliographic infrastructure, but the finding that surprised me most while building the dataset was language-specific:
Catalan/Valencian (~10M speakers) jumped from near-invisibility in commercial aggregators to 8th place globally once nine national library catalogues were cross-referenced. Bengali, Thai and Urdu —all with substantial publishing industries— remained near the bottom, not because translations don't exist but because the institutions documenting them haven't been connected yet.
The 97% figure (editions appearing in only one of 14 sources) held across every sample I could run. Happy to answer questions about methodology, source coverage, or why ISBN metadata is such a mess.
Have you all considered adding scientific articles to your bibliographic database? Finding existing translations of scientific articles can be a real pain. I know because I spent a lot of time doing that during my PhD [1].
For a while I was collaborating with Victor Venema in the volunteer organization Translate Science [2] to try to create a bibliographic database of scientific translations, but unfortunately Victor died, and I became too busy to continue.
Thanks for trying it, and for the honest feedback on purchase links, you’re right. Right now they link to a search on each store rather than directly to the specific edition page. It’s a known limitation: matching an ISBN to a direct product URL across different stores (each with their own catalog system) is surprisingly hard, but it’s on the roadmap.
Glad the core discovery part was useful though. And cool project with the quote finder; we all start rough!
Anna's Archive ISBN visualization is fascinating; it really shows how fragmented and incomplete the ISBN landscape is. We don't use their data directly (licensing concerns), but it confirmed what we were seeing: massive gaps in non-English coverage.
WorldCat is great for library holdings but harder to use for translation discovery specifically, it tells you "this library has this edition" but doesn't easily answer "has this book been translated into Basque?" across its whole catalog. We'd love to integrate it eventually, though.
Right now Wikidata turned out to be the secret weapon: it has structured translation relationships that none of the others provide.
Thanks for trying it! The localhost:8081 websocket isn't from Zenòdot, that's likely a browser extension (React DevTools, a proxy tool, or similar). Could you try in an incognito/private window with extensions disabled?
The search button activates once you've selected at least one language from the selector below the search bar. If you haven't picked any languages yet, it stays inactive... that might be what you're seeing.
Let me know if that helps!
ahh right, wrong error. This is the one I get:
Uncaught Error: Minified React error #418; visit https://react.dev/errors/418?args[]=HTML&args[]= for the full message or use the non-minified dev environment for full errors and additional helpful warnings.
That's a React hydration mismatch. I'm aware of it but hadn't seen it block functionality before. Thanks for flagging that it does for you.
Can I ask: when you load the page, do you see the language selector (a dropdown/search where you pick languages like English, French, etc.)? The search button only activates after selecting at least one language — if the hydration error is breaking the selector, that would explain why the button seems unclickable.
I'm looking into it right now. What Chrome version are you on?
Yeah, I've tried switching the languages, not ALL the text on the page changes from the default language and I've tried not changing the lang. Same thing.
Thanks for the details — that's very helpful. Chrome 145 on Mac, got it. The fact that text doesn't fully change when switching languages confirms the hydration error is breaking React's event handling.
I'm actively debugging this right now. I'll reply here when I have a fix deployed. shouldn't be long. Really appreciate your patience.
Update: The hydration bug has been fixed and deployed. The search should now work correctly. Thanks for the report, it helped us catch a real issue. Would love to hear if it works for you now!
reply