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3 hours ago
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The other day an officer from the French Gendarmerie commented that they use my python for crime analysis book. I asked that individual, and he stated they all speak English. But given my book is written in plain text markdown and compiled using Quarto, it is not that difficult to pipe the text through a tool to translate it to other languages. (Knowing that epubs under the hood are just html, it would not suprise me if there is some epub reader that can use google translate.)
So you can see now I have available in the Crime De-Coder store four new books:
ebook versions are normally $39.99, and print is $49.99 (both available worldwide). For the next few weeks, can use promo code translate25 (until 11/15/2025) to purchase epub versions for $19.99.
If you want to see a preview of the books first two chapters, here are the PDFs:
And here I added a page on my crimede-coder site with testimonials.
As the title says, this in the end cost (less than) $7 to convert to French (and ditto to convert to Spanish).
Here is code demo’ing the conversion. It uses OpenAI’s GPT-5 model, but likely smaller and cheaper models would work just fine if you did not want to fork out $7. It ended up being a quite simple afternoon project (parsing the markdown ended up being the bigger pain).
So the markdown for the book in plain text looks like this:
It ends up that because markdown uses line breaks to denote different sections, that ends up being a fairly natural break to do the translation. These GenAI tools cannot repeat back very long sequences, but a paragraph is a good length. Long enough to have additional context, but short enough for the machine to not go off the rails when trying to just return the text you input. Then I just have extra logic to not parse code sections (that start/end with three backticks). I don’t even bother to parse out the other sections (like LaTeX or HTML), and I just include in the prompt to not modify those.
So I just read in the quarto document, split by “”, then feed in the text sections into OpenAI. I did not test this very much, just use the current default gpt-5 model with medium reasoning. (It is quite possible a non-reasoning smaller model will do just as well. I suspect the open models will do fine.)
You will ultimately still want someone to spot check the results, and then do some light edits. For example, here is the French version when I am talking about running code in the REPL, first in English:
Running in the REPL
Now, we are going to run an interactive python session, sometimes people call this the REPL, read-eval-print-loop. Simply type python in the command prompt and hit enter. You will then be greeted with this screen, and you will be inside of a python session.
And then in French:
Exécution dans le REPL
Maintenant, nous allons lancer une session Python interactive, que certains appellent le REPL, boucle lire-évaluer-afficher. Tapez simplement python dans l’invite de commande et appuyez sur Entrée. Vous verrez alors cet écran et vous serez dans une session Python.
So the acronym is carried forward, but the description of the acronym is not. (And I went and edited that for the versions on my website.) But look at this section in the intro talking about GIS:
There are situations when paid for tools are appropriate as well. Statistical programs like SPSS and SAS do not store their entire dataset in memory, so can be very convenient for some large data tasks. ESRI’s GIS (Geographic Information System) tools can be more convenient for specific mapping tasks (such as calculating network distances or geocoding) than many of the open source solutions. (And ESRI’s tools you can automate by using python code as well, so it is not mutually exclusive.) But that being said, I can leverage python for nearly 100% of my day to day tasks. This is especially important for public sector crime analysts, as you may not have a budget to purchase closed source programs. Python is 100% free and open source.
And here in French:
Il existe également des situations où les outils payants sont appropriés. Les logiciels statistiques comme SPSS et SAS ne stockent pas l’intégralité de leur jeu de données en mémoire, ils peuvent donc être très pratiques pour certaines tâches impliquant de grands volumes de données. Les outils SIG d’ESRI (Système d’information géographique) peuvent être plus pratiques que de nombreuses solutions open source pour des tâches cartographiques spécifiques (comme le calcul des distances sur un réseau ou le géocodage). (Et les outils d’ESRI peuvent également être automatisés à l’aide de code Python, ce qui n’est pas mutuellement exclusif.) Cela dit, je peux m’appuyer sur Python pour près de 100 % de mes tâches quotidiennes. C’est particulièrement important pour les analystes de la criminalité du secteur public, car vous n’avez peut‑être pas de budget pour acheter des logiciels propriétaires. Python est 100 % gratuit et open source.
So it translated GIS to SIG in French (Système d’information géographique). Which seems quite reasonable to me.
I paid an individual to review the Spanish translation (if any readers are interested to give me a quote for the French version copy-edits, would appreciate it). She stated it is overall very readable, but just has many minor things. Here is a a sample of suggestions:
Total number of edits she suggested were 77 (out of 310 pages).
If you are interested in another language just let me know. I am not sure about translation for the Asian languages, but I imagine it works OK out of the box for most languages that are derivative of Latin. Another benefit of self-publishing, I can just have the French version available now, but if I am able to find someone to help with the copy-edits
