Why manga sound effects are not translated

Manga sound effects are hard to translate because they are drawn into the art, not typed into bubbles. A sound effect is part of the picture, so translating it means finding it, erasing a large stylized stroke and drawing a replacement in a matching style. RuneManga does not translate sound effects yet and leaves them as drawn.

What sound effects are

Sound effects, also called SFX or onomatopoeia, are the words that stand for sounds and sensations: a door slamming, rain, a heartbeat, a silent room. Japanese and Korean have many of them, including words for things that make no sound at all, such as a glowing face or a tense silence. They are written large, often in stylized brush-like lettering that is part of the composition.

Why they are hard

• They are art. The artist draws them, often with a unique shape for each sound.
• They overlap the drawing. Lines, characters and backgrounds sit behind and through the lettering, so erasing the letters means rebuilding a lot of picture.
• They are hard to read. Decorative and stretched lettering is far from the clean print that text readers are trained on.
• They carry no clear one-to-one translation. English sound words differ from Japanese or Korean ones, and a literal translation often looks odd.
• Placement matters. A sound effect in English needs a style, size and position that match the scene, or the page looks pasted over.

An example: the sound of silence

In Japanese manga, a quiet, awkward moment is often marked with the effect シーン, read shiin, which stands for silence even though silence makes no sound. A heartbeat is often ドキドキ, read doki doki. A translator can render these as a word, a description or nothing at all, and each choice changes how the scene feels. A program has to pick one for every effect on every page.

The options a translator has

1. Leave the sound effect as drawn. Safe for the art, but a reader who does not read the language misses it.
2. Add a small note beside it. The art stays and the meaning is added, but it adds clutter.
3. Replace it with a redrawn English effect. Closest to the original look, and the most work to get right.

Human translation teams usually choose between these on a page-by-page basis. A machine tool has to make the same choice automatically, and a wrong guess can ruin a good page.

What RuneManga does today

• Dialogue in speech bubbles is the priority, and that is what gets translated.
• Sound effects are not translated yet and stay as drawn, on purpose.
• Text outside bubbles, such as narration boxes and loose text on the art, is also not translated yet.
• An option for sound effects may come later. We have no date for it.

Why leaving them alone is a deliberate choice

A missed word in a bubble is easy to notice and easy to fix. A badly redrawn sound effect is harder to undo, because it changes the art itself and can make a good page look pasted over. Until a method works reliably, leaving the artist's lettering in place is the safer default.

How to read them in the meantime

• Use the picture. Most sound effects are clear from the scene: an impact, footsteps, a heartbeat.
• Compare Original and Result for the page, and look at the effect in the original.
• Look the word up in a dictionary or a sound-word list for the language if the exact word matters to you.
• Download the page and add a note in an image editor. The result is a normal PNG.

Questions

• Why RuneManga misses some text on a page
• Why translated text does not fit the bubble
• How does AI manga translation work?