The paperback of a translated book

Kindle Translate, KDP's translation service, makes ebooks. KDP's help is plain about the rest: “At this time, you cannot use Kindle Translate to create audiobooks or print books.” The translated text cannot be edited directly either. On KDP's forum in September 2026, a KDP staff member wrote that it cannot be downloaded during the beta.

So the paperback of a translated book needs a manuscript of its own: from a translator, or a translation you have checked yourself.

The short answer

Kindle Translate makes only the ebook, so the paperback of a translation needs its own interior, set from the translated manuscript. Expect a different page count from the original: the same novel at 6 × 9 came to 234 pages for 60,000 words in German and 280 in Turkish, against 218 in English. The quotation marks and the hyphenation change with the language too.

What Kindle Translate does

• It is an invite-only beta, for eligible ebooks on kdp.amazon.com.
• The book it translates must be in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish.
• It is free. A translation can be previewed before it is published, but not edited.
• A book translated with it cannot be translated again.

What the paperback needs

1. The translated text as a manuscript, such as a Word file.
2. A title of its own on KDP, with the book's language set. KDP's list of book languages has English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch, and no Turkish.
3. Its own ISBN. KDP says each format needs its own, and that an ISBN “cannot be reused across multiple book formats or new editions”.
4. A cover of its own, with the title in the language and a spine as wide as the new page count makes it.

How many pages it will have

We set the first six chapters of a novel in English and in seven translations, repeated to lengths from 40,000 to 100,000 words, and counted the pages of every book. At the same number of words, a 6 × 9 paperback came out like this:

A translation does not keep the word count of its original. Ours ran from 30% fewer words than the English, in Turkish, to 3% more, in Dutch, and another translator's text will differ. So count the words of the translated manuscript, then read the pages for that language in the measurements, which give every length and three trim sizes.

For our sample, a 60,000-word English novel came to 218 pages at 6 × 9. Its translations came to German 232, Dutch 227, Spanish 222, French 222, Portuguese 219, Italian 213 and Turkish 194, read off the measurements between two lengths.

The page count sets the spine width and the printing cost. The paperback of a translation needs its own cover file and its own price.

The punctuation changes with the language

Each language marks speech its own way. These lines are from books we set from our own translations:

We set the quotation marks from the book's language, so a manuscript typed with straight quotes comes out with the marks above. In French we also put a narrow space that can't break inside the guillemets and before ? ! : and ;, so a question mark never starts a line. Dialogue dashes are kept as they were typed, and words are hyphenated by the rules of the book's language.

What we do

We set the paperback of a translation from its manuscript, in any of these eight languages. The page count, the spine width and the cover follow from the new length. We also make the translation's ebook, if you publish it yourself rather than through Kindle Translate.

Sources

• KDP: Beta: Kindle Translate
• KDP: What is an ISBN and Imprint?
• KDP: Book Supported Languages
• KDP Community: Previewing and downloading the translated version (8 September 2026)
• The measurements, as CSV