Case study
ProsaBridge
An enterprise AI translation engine for book publishers
Where translation tools give up
A book is one long argument. Most tools translate it one sentence at a time.
Machine translation is good at sentences and bad at books. Across four hundred pages, terminology drifts, tone wanders, and recurring phrases return in new disguises. The working format of publishing is Microsoft Word, and a careless pipeline shreds it: headings, footnotes, emphasis, the typography a book is set in.
ProsaBridge is built for exactly this case: very large manuscripts, strong terminology control, and theological and academic content, where a wrong term is not a blemish but an error.
How it holds a book together
The layout survives
Manuscripts are extracted to XLIFF, translated, and reinjected. The Word document keeps its structure, down to footnotes and emphasis.
Terminology holds
A map-reduce pass over the whole manuscript builds the glossary before translation begins, so every term is rendered one way, everywhere.
Continuity carries
Every passage is translated with overlapping context from its neighbors, and domain lookups ground theological references in the source text.
ProsaBridge is built for European publishers, and compliance is part of the engineering: the pipeline is fully EU AI Act compliant.
It lives in Word
Editors keep their instrument.
The ProsaBridge add-in uploads the active manuscript, reports progress while the pipeline works, and delivers the translated document back into Word. When a passage reads wrong, the editor flags it without leaving the page.
The company
Built by two people who take books seriously.
I founded ProsaBridge with André Vornholt, who leads the company as CEO. As co-founder and CTO I own the architecture and the engineering. Our first publishing customer is testing the engine on real manuscripts, and in October 2026 we will be at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
I live in four languages, so translation is not an abstract problem to me. I know what a careless one loses. ProsaBridge exists so a publisher never has to accept that loss.
See ProsaBridge
The product, the pipeline, and the company.