Use cases · Manga
Translate Japanese manga with RuneManga
What works for black-and-white Japanese manga, which readers the extension handles, the settings to use and the guides to read next.
Japanese manga is what RuneManga reads best today. Pages are usually black and white, the lettering is vertical and sits inside speech bubbles, and chapters come as separate pages. That is the case the pipeline was tuned on: the text in each bubble is found and read, the lettering is erased, the background under it is filled in and the translation is set back in the same bubble.
What works well
- Dialogue in speech bubbles on clean, large scans.
- Vertical Japanese lettering, read bubble by bubble and set horizontally in the target language.
- The old text erased and the background filled in, instead of covered with a white box.
- A whole chapter in one job, from 50 pages on Free up to 500 on Ultimate, in reading order.
What does not work yet
- Sound effects drawn into the art stay as drawn, on purpose.
- Narration boxes and loose text outside bubbles are not translated yet.
- Furigana on small scans can blur into the main text and confuse recognition.
- Colorizing the page is planned, not available yet.
Where you read
- Pages saved as files, a folder, a ZIP, a CBZ or a PDF: use the WebApp.
- Readers that show each page as an ordinary image: the browser extension translates them in place.
- Readers that draw pages on a protected canvas: the browser blocks reading them, so use the WebApp with pages you have the right to process.
Recommended settings
- Mode: Translate. Colorize and Translate + colorize are in development.
- Original language: Japanese. Auto-detect usually finds it, but a page with one or two words can be guessed wrong.
- Translate into: the language you read. Shorter languages such as English fit small bubbles best.
- Input: the largest scan you have, as PNG or lightly compressed JPG or WebP, pages not stitched together.
Questions
Do I need to change the page order for right-to-left reading?
No. Send page one first. Each bubble is translated in place, so the reading direction stays the one you know.
Can I translate into a language other than English?
Yes. Translate into lists 89 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Turkish. Arabic and Thai are experimental.