Manga refers to a wide variety of comic books and graphic novels that conform to a style which was developed in Japan in the late 19th Century. Unlike American and other comic books that are usually printed in full color, Manga are predominantly published in black and white with full color prints reserved only for special releases.
Manga are usually published in installments and can go up to hundreds of pages long depending on their type and form. Manga comics are well known and popular for their characters and in-depth stories and have been well respected and admired since a long time.
Since Manga are published in the Japanese language, English speakers are left out from such dynamic and artistic pieces of work. In this article we will be exploring 2 websites where you can upload Manga comic pages in the image form and get the text in them interpreted and translated into English using OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
1. Yandex Translate
Yandex Translate is a popular web service solely intended for the translation of web pages and text in images (OCR) including Manga comics, into another language. The website uses a self-learning machine translation that has been developed by Yandex.
Simply click on the link provided below, click on ‘Select file to upload’ and then upload the Manga comic image in any popular image format such as JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP etc. Next, select the Source language as well as the language into which you desire to translate the Manga comic image and the translated page will be displayed in a while.
You must remember that all the graphics and cartoons remain the same without any change. Only the Japanese text is translated into English or any other selected language. Yandex Translate supports more than 75 languages for the translation. You can click on the ‘Download’ button to download the translated Manga page in JPG format. Alternatively, you can also click on ‘Open as Text’ to view only the Source and Translated text side by side (without graphics) and then copy and paste it into any other application if required. Use the buttons, Translation and Original to toggle between the corresponding images and see the comparison for yourselves.
Overall, I found that the quality of OCR is good and most of the Japanese text in the Manga comic page is clearly translated into English by Yandex.
Click here to navigate to Yandex Translate.
2. TouHou Image Manga Translator
Let’s move on to the next Manga Translator to help you translate your Manga comic pages to English. The process is more or less the same as the earlier tool. Just select the source and the destination language (English) and then drag and drop the Manga image in the space provided and then click on Translate. Wait for a while as your translation will be queued and executed depending upon the number of translations in the waiting list. Once the work is done, the translated page will be displayed on the screen. You can right click on the image and save it in your local disk on the PNG format if required.
Overall, TouHou Manga translator works fine but there is a drawback in that whenever you upload an image, your translation work enters a queue, and you are assigned a number in it. Hence often, it really takes considerable time for the translation to be done.
Click here to navigate to TouHou Image Manga Translator.
Closing Comments:
You can freely test any of the above tools and use the one that works best for you while translating the Manga into English. But, let me remind you that the quality of translation also depends on the resolution and clarity of the uploaded comic page.
