Today, let’s talk about literature in Hungarian. How many books are published in this language, what share is local and foreign literature, and what to do if your book has no Hungarian translation.
According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH), 15,915 book and booklet titles were published in Hungary in 2025. Of these, 10,187 were works by Hungarian authors and 5,728 by foreign authors, or approximately 36%.
The share of foreign literature has remained fairly stable in recent years. But these figures do not give the exact number of new translations specifically into Hungarian, and we have not found these data anywhere. Please let us know if you know where to find these figures.
| Year | Publications by Hungarian authors | Publications by foreign authors | Foreign authors’ share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 10,462 | 5,404 | 34.1% |
| 2024 | 10,336 | 5,921 | 36.4% |
| 2025 | 10,187 | 5,728 | 36.0% |
To compare the scale: around 177,000 publications with ISBNs were released in the United Kingdom in 2023, and more than four million, including self-publishing, in the United States in 2025. These figures cover different languages and formats, and different formats of the same book may be counted separately. They give an idea of the volume of book publishing in these countries; to determine what share of these books is available in Hungarian, the availability of translations needs to be checked separately.
Readers write about books missing from Hungarian shelves in blogs and book communities. In a 2021 selection, writer Viktória Anna Imre recommended books she wanted to introduce to Hungarian readers in English. The list included Caitlin Doughty’s books about death and funeral customs, as well as fantasy novels and series. She explained that you could wait years for a translation, if it appeared at all.
Perhaps you have encountered this yourself: you find an author whose subjects or stories interest you, and then struggle to find their books in Hungarian. In niche literature, the available editions may be limited to a few languages or just the original. And we agree that millions of books, unfortunately, will never, literally never, be translated. This is quite understandable, because a full translation of a book involves a great deal of work by several people: a translator, a proofreader, and an editor. So when you want to read a particular author, searching for a translation becomes an integral part of searching for the book.
It is especially frustrating when you have started reading a series and enjoyed it, but the new books have not been translated and it is unclear whether there will be translations at all. In a 2025 discussion in the Hungarian book community r/konyv, a reader talked about series they had come to love whose publication in Hungarian had stopped. They named Marko Kloos’s Frontlines and Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse; other readers added their own examples and described contacting publishers about missing sequels.
It is quite clear that this situation exists literally throughout the non-English-speaking world. We have encountered it too. So where should you look for a Hungarian translation? First of all, you should try these catalogues:
- The National Széchényi Library’s catalogues. This page links to NEKTÁR, the national library’s central catalogue, and Széchényi Híd, which searches several of its collections. Start with the author’s name, because the Hungarian title of the book may differ significantly from the original.
- The Hungarian Electronic Library, MEK. Here you can look for books you can read online, including older Hungarian translations.
- The National Library of Foreign Literature. Here you can search for an author or an edition.
It is also worth checking the publisher that released the previous books in the series. Browse its catalogue and planned publications, or ask whether it plans to publish the next volume. If you find an older edition in a library catalogue, ask your local library whether it can help you obtain a copy. A book missing from an online shop may still be available elsewhere.
But what should you do if you have searched everywhere and the book you want still has no available Hungarian translation? Machine translation, or AI translation, can help here. There are also these options—you can translate chapter by chapter through Google Translate, you can use various plugins, you can even create your own translator. Or you can use our translation service—AI ebook Translator, which has already taken into account all the particularities of translating ebooks and translates even genres that many AI models simply refuse to translate because they contain “inappropriate content” and explicit scenes.
Yes, some types of romance literature, such as dark romance, romantasy, MM romance, hockey romance, paranormal romance, and omegaverse, are not so easy to translate without losing entire paragraphs of text that AI models flag as censored content or simply omit from the results. We translate these books too. If you enjoy a little-known romance series, you should be able to read it in your own language, just as you would a classic or a bestseller.
Non-fiction is another reason to consider AI book translation specifically. Suppose you have found a new book on a subject you are working on now, but there is no Hungarian edition or the translation is still a long way off. If it is a book about modern technology, business, or a developing field, you may need the information now. A translation that appears years later will be of little help. So, if you have the right to translate the original ebook, you can start reading it literally within minutes.
To translate with our service, you specifically need an ebook. We, of course, recommend buying ebooks legally and supporting the author. Look for an EPUB that you can upload to us; we also accept FB2. In particular, check whether the book will be available to download, because access in a reading app does not necessarily mean you will receive the file itself.
Here are places to look for romance literature: a romance publisher’s catalogue and an ebook shop. Some of these books are very explicit; some appeal to a small, devoted audience. Perhaps you follow a particular author or are looking for a very specific type of story.
Once you have the file, you can translate the book into Hungarian for your own reading. Keep the translation for yourself. Support the author, respect their rights, and do not upload the translated book to file-sharing sites or distribute it to other people.
Before translating, check the licence terms and local law: translation may require the rightsholder’s permission: buying a copy alone does not always resolve questions of copyright and the possibility of translating it for yourself.
Want to see what comes out the other side? Read Jack London's War in Hungarian — the whole story, translated by this service and published without a single human edit.
So if you already have a book you want to read, open AI ebook Translator, upload your EPUB or FB2 that you have the right to translate, and choose Hungarian. Whether it is the next book in a series, a niche romance, or non-fiction you need now, we want to help you read it.
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