We believe that books are not just data. They are rhythms, subtexts, and souls. Our mission is to build the bridge between the precision of technology and the intuition of the human spirit.
Quoorum began with a small group of authors, translators, and engineers who simply enjoyed talking about books. Books they had read in one language, but could not find in another. Books they wished they could share across languages without losing what made them books in the first place.
Naturally, they tried to translate them.
At first, the objective was simple: make books available in other languages. But very quickly, it became clear that existing automated approaches had serious limits. Scale was the first issue. Continuity was the second. The results were often usable, sometimes impressive, but rarely convincing over the length of a full book. Something was consistently missing.
Rather than trying to optimise tools, the group decided to step back and ask more fundamental questions. How does a professional translator actually work? What happens between a first draft and a finished translation? How does a translator challenge their own choices? What distinguishes a competent translation from a truly good one?
Over several months, these questions were explored through long discussions with experienced literary translators. The focus was not on techniques, but on reasoning. How translators reread themselves. How they hesitate. How they return to a paragraph after time has passed. How they notice when a sentence is correct but wrong in tone. How they detect slow drifts in voice across chapters.
A good translator hesitates. They reread. They question their first choices. They weigh rhythm against precision, fidelity against voice. Translation is not about replacing words, but about making decisions — and accepting responsibility for them.
From these conversations, a set of guiding principles emerged. Not rules in a technical sense, but editorial criteria: continuity, responsibility, and the ability to revise one’s own decisions.
This realisation changed everything. These principles became the foundation of Quoorum’s approach.
To give this reasoning a durable form, we worked closely with experienced literary translators and, in parallel, with academic partners from a French engineering school and an Australian university. Their role was not to accelerate anything, but to help articulate and structure a complex system — developed over many months — capable of reflecting, as closely as possible, the way a human translator thinks, questions, and revises their work. The technical and conceptual effort behind this system is substantial, but it remains deliberately invisible.
Quoorum does not fragment books into independent blocks. A manuscript is treated as a continuous object, with memory, tension, and internal logic.
The act of translating itself represents only part of the work. The greater effort lies in what follows: comparison, contradiction, refinement, and editorial arbitration. Different linguistic perspectives are confronted, choices are challenged, and the text is stabilised as a whole.
This is why we reject systems designed primarily for speed. Parallelisation may produce results in minutes, but it sacrifices coherence, voice, and accountability. A book cannot be assembled from isolated parts without losing something essential.
Our goal is not to neutralise a text into something safe or generic. We aim to preserve its voice, its tension, and its specific texture — including its imperfections, when they are intentional.
At Quoorum, we do not simply translate words.
We protect narrative continuity.
And above all, we protect the reader’s journey.