By @Dante Dominguez
*A nonstandard, humorous alternative spelling of help... Off-topic: look at those sad green eyes. They are looking at you, you book-less person.
If you don't have a text to translate yet, and you have been unable to contact an author -and/or the author doesn't recognize the value that a free translation entails and wants to charge you for the rights to use their intellectual properties-, fret not. Here, you will find clear guidelines on where and how to find texts under the Creative Commons public copyright licenses or in the Public Domain.
Read more about Creative Commons here:
When we share, everyone wins - Creative Commons
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they (the author) have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
The public domain consists of all the creative works to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Some works are not covered by copyright, and are therefore in the public domain. Other works are actively dedicated by their authors to the public domain.
Read more about Public Domain here:
All the sites listed here have either Creative Commons or Public Domain books (or both). Please note that this does not mean that the books haven't been translated yet. They may have translations already. It is your duty, as a future translator (and it's part of your academic endeavors) to verify if the book needs a translation or not. That bein said, these are the websites (projects) with the biggest selection of books under these categories:
List of major Creative Commons licensed works
HathiTrust Digital Library | Millions of books online