Last updated: 2026-08-04
This page answers the five questions people actually ask before handing a book to a translation service. Our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are the binding documents; this is the same content in the words people use to ask about it.
Every answer below was checked against the running system on 2026-08-04 — the storage configuration, the code that moves your file, and the database — not against what we would like to be true. Where the honest answer is "not yet" or "we can't promise that on someone else's behalf," it says so.
The short version
We keep it until you ask us to delete it. There is no automatic expiry running today, and we would rather say that plainly than imply files vanish on their own: books uploaded when the service opened in February 2026 are still in storage.
Three things exist after a translation runs:
The working copies are the exception. While a translation is running we unpack your book onto the translation server, and those unpacked files are deleted as soon as the finished EPUB is packaged — every run, automatically.
If you would rather none of it stayed, one email removes all three. See the deletion answer below.
In transit, yes, without exception: every upload and download travels over HTTPS through a signed link that expires. At rest the answer is narrower, and we would rather give you the narrow version than a reassuring one — the file sits in a private storage bucket protected by access control, and we have not enabled bucket-level server-side encryption on top of that.
The transit half in detail: your browser uploads the file directly to storage over HTTPS, using a signed link we generate for that one file, which stops working after 10 minutes. Downloads use the same mechanism with a link that expires after 30 minutes. The bucket is private, so your book has no public URL and nothing in it can be fetched by anyone without a valid signed link.
The at-rest half in detail: your file sits in that bucket and your chapter text sits in our database, both hosted on Alibaba Cloud in Tokyo, both guarded by access control — private ACLs, expiring links, credentials that never reach the browser — rather than by an encryption layer we apply ourselves. Turning server-side encryption on is a small change we have not made, and until we do, "encrypted at rest" is not a phrase we are entitled to use.
Not by us — and the rest is not ours to promise. We build and train no models, we do not use your book to improve anything of ours, and we do not sell it or share it beyond what is described here. But translating it means sending its chapters to DeepSeek's API, and DeepSeek's own privacy policy reserves the right to use inputs and outputs to train and improve its models. That is another company's policy; we cannot waive it for them, so we are not going to tell you your book will never be trained on.
The detail, since it decides the question for some people: we send the book to DeepSeek one chunk at a time, and DeepSeek's API terms do not carve developer traffic out of the training clause in its privacy policy. There is no zero-retention tier in the arrangement we use today.
What that means in practice: if you are translating a published book you own, this is the same exposure you accept with any AI translation tool, including pasting chapters into a chatbot yourself. If you are translating an unpublished manuscript that has to stay confidential, that is a genuine consideration and you should weigh it before uploading. We would rather lose the upload than have you find this out afterwards.
Yes — email [email protected] from the address on your account and we delete the uploaded EPUB, the translated EPUB, and the stored chapter text; a full account deletion removes your account record as well. There is no self-serve delete button in the product yet, so email is the only route today.
Payment records are the one thing we cannot purge on request: Paddle is the merchant of record for every order and holds that data for as long as tax law requires of it.
Our Privacy Policy commits us to the response times set by applicable law — 30 days under GDPR — and in practice it is much faster, because a person reads that inbox. A self-serve delete button is the obvious next step and it is not built; we would rather tell you it does not exist than let you go looking.
You do. A translation is a derivative work of the book it came from, and our Terms of Service state that copyright in the translation belongs entirely to you: we do not own, claim, or participate in any rights in it. That is not a licence we grant back to you — we never take the rights in the first place.
The chain holds upstream as well. DeepSeek's API terms assign any rights in the output to the API customer, which is us, and we pass them straight through to you rather than sitting on them.
What this does not do is give you rights to the source book. Translating a book you do not own or have permission to translate does not make the result yours to publish, and our Terms put that responsibility on the person who uploads.
We log the file name, the file size, and what happened to it — uploaded, translated, failed — to our own analytics, so that a broken upload can be told apart from an abandoned one. That is metadata about the file, never its contents.
Payment data never touches our servers at all. Paddle is the merchant of record for every order and handles card details directly; we see that an order was paid, not how it was paid.
Email [email protected]. If the answer turns out to be something other people would want before uploading, it belongs on this page, and we will add it here rather than reply to one person at a time.