Translate Book Parallel

This tackles the context window problem that kills most book translation attempts. Instead of feeding a 300-page PDF into one session and watching it choke or lose coherence halfway through, it splits the book into ~6000 character chunks, spins up 8 parallel Claude subagents that each translate one chunk in isolation, then validates and merges everything back into DOCX, EPUB, and PDF. The manifest.json tracks SHA-256 hashes so you can resume if something fails without re-translating finished chunks. Requires Calibre and Pandoc locally, which is a bit of setup friction, but the pipeline design is solid. Works with PDF, DOCX, and EPUB inputs. If you've ever tried to translate technical documentation or a full book and hit the context limit wall, this is the workaround.

skills.sh installs: 1.3K
GitHub stars: 61
last updated: Jul 14, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add aradotso/trending-skills --skill translate-book-parallel --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Translate Book (Parallel Subagents)

Skill by ara.so — Daily 2026 Skills collection.

A Claude Code skill that translates entire books (PDF/DOCX/EPUB) into any language using parallel subagents. Each chunk gets an isolated context window — preventing truncation and context accumulation that plague single-session translation.

Pipeline Overview

Input (PDF/DOCX/EPUB)
  │
  ▼
Calibre ebook-convert → HTMLZ → HTML → Markdown
  │
  ▼
Split into chunks (~6000 chars each)
  │  manifest.json tracks SHA-256 hashes
  ▼
Parallel subagents (8 concurrent by default)
  │  each: read chunk → translate → write output_chunk*.md
  ▼
Validate (manifest hash check, 1:1 source↔output match)
  │
  ▼
Merge → Pandoc → HTML (with TOC) → Calibre → DOCX / EPUB / PDF

Prerequisites

# 1. Calibre (provides ebook-convert)
# macOS
brew install --cask calibre
# Linux
sudo apt-get install calibre
# Or download from https://calibre-ebook.com/

# 2. Pandoc
brew install pandoc        # macOS
sudo apt-get install pandoc # Linux

# 3. Python dependencies
pip install pypandoc beautifulsoup4

Verify all tools are available:

SKILL.md on GitHub