Which Languages Should You Translate Your Picture Book Into?

You have decided to translate your picture book. The pipeline is affordable, the artwork survives, and you are ready to reach readers who do not read English. Then you hit the question that stops a lot of authors cold: into which language?

It is a bigger question than it looks. Translate into too many languages at once and you end up with five editions you do not have the time to market, each quietly invisible in its store. Translate into the wrong one and you have a beautiful German edition selling two copies a month in a market that was never going to be yours. The good news is that the decision follows a small number of sensible factors, and once you can see them laid out, the right shortlist for your particular book tends to pick itself.

This post is a neutral decision guide, not a ranking. There is no universally best language to translate a children's book into. There is only the best fit for your book, your audience, and how much attention you can give each edition. What follows is the set of questions that get you to that fit.

Start with the demand you can already see

Before any market-size table, look at the signals you already have. They are worth more than any general statistic, because they are about your book specifically.

Read your reviews and reader emails. "I wish my daughter could read this in Spanish" is not a throwaway comment; it is a customer telling you exactly which edition they would buy. A handful of those comments pointing at the same language is the strongest signal you will ever get.

Look at where your English edition already sells. In your KDP dashboard you can see sales by marketplace. If you are already moving copies on Amazon.de or Amazon.es, you have readers in those countries buying your book in English. Some of them, and many of the parents and grandparents around them, would prefer it in their own language.

Consider your own audience and heritage. Bilingual-family authors often write because they want their own child to read the book in two languages. If you have a personal or community connection to a language, that connection usually comes with a built-in first audience and a reason to market the edition that a stranger to the language does not have.

If one or two languages jump out from these signals, you can almost stop here. Translate into the language your readers are asking for. The rest of this post is for deciding when the signal is quiet or when you are choosing your second, third, and fourth editions.

Weigh four things for each candidate language

When the demand signal is not obvious, four factors decide whether a language is worth a translation: market size and appetite, competition, distribution, and your own time.

Market size and appetite for translated English picture books. A large population is not the same as a large market for your kind of book. What you want is a country with an active children's book market, a culture of buying picture books, and an established appetite for translated English-language titles. Germany, Spain, France, and Brazil all tick those boxes. Smaller markets can still be excellent, but the maths is tighter.

Competition and discoverability. A bigger market is also a more crowded one. A translated picture book competes with every domestic picture book in that language plus every other translated import. Sometimes a slightly smaller market with fewer translated competitors is easier to get visible in than the obvious giant. This is where a niche or a specific theme helps: a book about a topic underserved in the target language can outperform its market size.

Distribution: can you actually sell there? This is the factor authors most often forget. A language is only useful to you if you can put the book in front of its readers. Amazon runs dedicated Kindle and KDP stores for Germany (amazon.de), France (amazon.fr), Spain (amazon.es), Italy (amazon.it), the Netherlands (amazon.nl), Brazil (amazon.com.br), and Mexico (amazon.com.mx), among others. Languages without a dedicated Amazon store of their own (Russian and Turkish are the notable cases among the languages we support) can still be sold, but you reach their readers through the global Amazon.com store or other retailers rather than a home marketplace, which usually means fewer sales unless you already have an audience there.

There is a print-specific catch worth knowing if your picture book is going to paperback or hardcover and not just ebook. KDP's print store has historically supported a narrower set of languages for interior files than its ebook store, with the Western European languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and a few regional languages of Spain) on the supported list and others added over time. Amazon expands this list periodically, so check KDP's current supported-languages page before you commit to a print edition in Dutch, Polish, or one of the Nordic languages. The ebook edition is rarely a problem; the print edition occasionally is.

Your own time. Exporting a translated file takes an afternoon. Marketing an edition so it actually finds readers takes ongoing attention: localised metadata, the right categories and keywords in that store, a cover that reads as native, and ideally a few reviews. Every edition you add is another book to look after. This is the real reason to start narrow, and we come back to it at the end.

The shortlist most English-language authors land on

With those four factors in mind, here is where most English-language picture book authors end up. Treat this as a starting map, not a verdict.

Language	Main Amazon store	Why authors choose it	Worth knowing
German	amazon.de	Large, mature children's book market with a strong appetite for translated English picture books and high ebook and print adoption.	The most common first choice. Quality expectations are high; a native review pays off.
Spanish	amazon.es, amazon.com.mx, plus the US Hispanic readership on amazon.com	The widest reach by speaker count, across Spain, Latin America, and a large US audience.	Decide which market you are aiming at; it shapes the European versus Latin American Spanish choice.
French	amazon.fr	Big, established, picture-book-loving market across France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada.	Strong domestic publishing means more competition. A clear niche helps.
Brazilian Portuguese	amazon.com.br	Large and growing market, less crowded with translated indie picture books than the European giants.	Choose Brazilian, not European, Portuguese unless your audience is specifically in Portugal.
Italian	amazon.it	Solid mid-size market with steady demand for translated children's books.	A reliable second or third edition rather than a first.
Dutch	amazon.nl	Affluent, literate market that buys picture books readily.	Very high English proficiency means many Dutch families happily read the English original, which can cap demand.
Swedish, Danish, Norwegian	global Amazon.com and local retailers	Affluent Nordic markets with a deep picture book culture.	No dedicated Amazon store and very high English fluency. Best when you have a specific Nordic audience.
Polish	global Amazon.com and local retailers	Large population and a growing book market, with younger children less likely to read English directly.	Distribution is more retailer-led than Amazon-led; price sensitivity is higher.

Russian and Turkish round out the thirteen languages LingoHop supports. Both have very large speaker bases, but neither has a dedicated Amazon store in the same way the others do, so they make most sense when you already have a following or a distribution route into those audiences rather than as a speculative first edition.

A note on the Spanish and Portuguese variant questions

Two of these languages come with a fork in the road.

For Spanish, the choice between European (Castilian) Spanish and Latin American Spanish comes down to which market you are chasing. Latin American Spanish reaches the larger audience, including the very large Spanish-speaking readership in the United States and the markets around Amazon Mexico. European Spanish fits Spain and Amazon.es. In a picture book the practical differences are usually small, a matter of some vocabulary and a few grammatical forms, and because you review every line before you publish you can steer the text either way. It is a big enough topic that it gets its own post.

For Portuguese, LingoHop offers Brazilian and European Portuguese as two separate options. For most authors the answer is Brazilian, simply because Brazil is a large book market with its own Amazon store while Portugal is much smaller. Choose European Portuguese only when your audience is specifically Portuguese.

Why you should start with one language

Here is the argument that runs underneath everything above. With a traditional localisation agency, every language is a fresh EUR 1,500 to EUR 5,000 invoice, so authors agonise over the choice because each one is a serious financial commitment. With AI translation the price is a flat EUR 59 per book (EUR 79 for large picture books), the same for every language, and you can read the full breakdown in our post on what it costs to translate a children's book.

When cost stops being the constraint, a different constraint takes its place: your attention. A translated edition does not sell itself the moment it goes live. It needs its own product page in the target language, the right categories and keywords for that store, a description that reads as if it were written by a native speaker, and the slow work of gathering its first reviews. Five editions launched in a weekend and then ignored will, between them, sell less than one edition you chose deliberately and supported properly.

So the sensible pattern is to start with one. Pick the language your readers are asking for, or the largest friendly market if there is no clear signal, and take that single edition all the way through: translate it, review it, publish it, and give it a few months of real attention. Watch how it sells, what readers say, and how much work the edition actually needed. Then expand, because the second, third, and fourth languages are now fast and cheap. LingoHop keeps your original file, so adding a language later is one credit and a few clicks, with no re-upload and no disturbance to the editions you already published.

That turns an intimidating one-time decision ("which five languages?") into a sequence of small, low-risk ones ("which language next?"). It is a much easier way to build a multilingual backlist, and it means your first translated edition teaches you something before you have spent money on four more.

Where to go from here

If you have not yet seen how a translation actually comes together, the step-by-step walkthrough of how translating a children's book works shows the whole pipeline, including what happens to the artwork on your cover and inside the pages. If you are weighing the spend, the cost guide lays out every option from agencies to DIY.

And if you already know which language your readers want, the fastest way to decide is to run it. Upload your picture book, pick that language, and use the free sample to see your translated cover and a couple of spreads. The result will tell you more than any market-size table, including this one.

Melanie