For content creators
Translate the next post without losing your voice
Long-form content lives or dies on voice. Run your post through Transept with a styleguide built from your own writing, choose from alternatives per sentence, polish for native readability, and export back to Notion, Substack, or wherever the original lived.
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For essayists, newsletter writers, indie publishers, and content creators with an audience that crosses language borders, translation has been a brutal choice: pay a human translator $200+ per post (and wait a week), or run it through ChatGPT and accept that the voice flattens. Neither scales for a weekly publishing cadence. This workflow is the middle path: route the post through Transept with a voice styleguide trained on your past writing, pick alternatives where the rhythm matters, polish for native readability, and ship it back to Notion or Substack or wherever the original lived — with the formatting and the voice both intact.
How does a newsletter writer translate an issue?
For essayists, newsletter writers, and bloggers who want to publish in more markets without becoming a different writer in each one.
Import from where you write
Notion page, Google Doc, Substack export, or paste the markdown. Pull in the post with its formatting intact — headers, callouts, blockquotes, image references.
Train a voice styleguide on your past work
Paste in two or three of your previously translated posts and Transept proposes a styleguide that fits your tone — sentence rhythm, idiom choices, the things you do that you can’t articulate.
Translate with the styleguide steering every sentence
Standard or Pro mode. Pro uses the more capable models and is worth it for nuanced writing — essays, opinion pieces, anything where the voice is the substance.
Pick alternatives, then polish
Walk through the sentences where it matters most — the opening, the closing, the lines you’re proudest of — and pick from alternatives. Run a polish pass for the rest.
Publish where the original lives
Export back to Notion as a new translated page, or as Markdown for Substack, Ghost, or your own static site. The formatting comes back.
Why do writers stop dreading translation?
Your voice survives
The styleguide carries the things that make your writing yours. Not just words — sentence shape, rhythm, idiom.
Native readability
A polish pass smoothes the awkwardness translators leave behind, without straying into "AI rewrite".
Notion in, Notion out
Your draft lives in Notion. The translated version lives next to it. No copy-paste, no formatting cleanup.
10 languages, one weekend
We translated Transept itself into ten languages over three days, running our own pages through the editor, glossary, and memory on this site. If you are reading this in German or Ukrainian, it came through the same workflow you are looking at.
Field notes from the weekend— Don’t take our word for it —
The editor, in miniature
A working slice of the real thing — Literess, glossary, styleguide, workflows, and the translation memory are all live. Click around.
Here to help you translate
A key turned in the lock and the door swung open.
У замку повернувся ключ, і двері розчахнулися.
The knock came just before midnight.
Стукіт пролунав перед самою північчю.
FAQ
- No — that’s the whole reason for the styleguide and the alternatives view. You pick the line that sounds like you. The output should read as a translation of your work, not a generic rewrite.
- A 1,500-word post in Standard mode is 1,500 words — under 2% of the Starter plan’s monthly 100K. Pro is 3× source words. Most newsletter writers run several months of content under Starter.
- Yes — batch translation handles the matrix. One post, six languages, same styleguide applied to all of them.
- Markdown exports round-trip cleanly. For Substack’s HTML export, use the markdown variant of the post — it’s what Substack uses internally and what Transept handles best.
- Yes — paste in two or three of your previously translated posts (or posts written natively in the target language) and Transept proposes a styleguide that captures your tone, rhythm, and idiom choices. Refine it once; reuse it across every future post.
- Export your post from Substack as Markdown (the format Substack uses internally). Translate in Transept. Paste the result back into a new Substack post — formatting comes back as Substack expects it. Same workflow for Beehiiv, Ghost, and Buttondown.
- No — properly localized content with `hreflang` tags is a positive SEO signal for international readers. Use Substack’s built-in localization or set up subdomains/subdirectories per language in your CMS.
- Substack’s native translation is convenient for casual translation but doesn’t carry your styleguide or let you pick alternatives. For posts where voice matters, the Transept workflow produces noticeably better output. For quick translations of news-style content, the native feature is fine.
- A 1,500-word post in Standard mode is 1,500 words — about 1.5% of the Starter plan’s monthly 100K allowance. In Pro mode (recommended for voice-heavy content) it’s 4,500 words, about 4.5%.
Keep reading around this workflow
- FeatureA styleguide that steers every regeneration→Tone, register, rules, formatting conventions. Build a styleguide manually or have Transept generate one from a sample page of finished…
- Use caseTranslate a book without losing the voice→A character glossary that holds across 300 pages. A styleguide built from a sample chapter. Sentence-level alternatives for dialogue. A…
- CompareTransept vs ChatGPT for translation→ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are remarkable general-purpose AI assistants. They translate, summarize, rewrite, and explain — all from a chat…
Publish in more languages and still sound like you
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