perevodnik

Perevodnik (the Russian word for translator) is an open-source system that takes a PDF book as input and produces a translated, browsable website as output. It is designed to run on your own Claude Code subscription at no additional cost. The README frames the motivation plainly: technical knowledge published under open licenses is still inaccessible to people who do not read the language it was written in, and existing paid translation services handle technical content poorly.

The core idea is to split a book into individual sections and assign one AI agent session to each section, rather than trying to translate the whole book in a single long conversation. A shared glossary file grows as each agent works through its section, so every subsequent agent sees the terminology decisions already made. The system also compares the extracted text against scanned images of each page, because text extraction tools tend to mangle mathematical formulas and figure references.

The translation can be paused and resumed at any time. If your daily usage limit runs out partway through a book, you close the terminal and come back later. Running Claude Code in the project directory and typing "continue" is enough to pick up where the pipeline left off. The progress state is tracked through ordinary files in the project folder.

The finished output is a website built with MkDocs, a documentation tool that renders nicely in a browser. Each section becomes a page, formulas are preserved, and there is an edit button on each page so readers can suggest corrections through a pull request.

The README is written in Russian. Current language templates cover Russian and English, and the project notes that adding a new target language involves copying one template folder and translating a single guide file.