How to translate Japanese manga to English

To translate Japanese manga into English with RuneManga, add the pages in reading order, set Original language to Japanese, set Translate into to English, choose Translate and press the button. The vertical lettering inside speech bubbles is read and the English is set horizontally in the same bubble. Japanese is the source language RuneManga reads best today.

Step by step

1. Gather the pages as PNG, JPG or WebP files, or as one ZIP, with names that sort in reading order (001.png, 002.png and so on).
2. Open the WebApp and add them. A folder or a ZIP works too, and numbers are sorted naturally, so 2.png comes before 10.png.
3. Choose Translate.
4. Set Original language to Japanese. Auto-detect usually finds it, but a page with very little text can be guessed wrong, so choosing Japanese is safer.
5. Set Translate into to English and press the button.
6. Use Original and Result to compare each page, then download the pages or the whole chapter as a ZIP.

Vertical text and reading order

Japanese manga is read from right to left and the lettering is usually vertical. RuneManga reads each bubble on its own and puts the translation back into that same bubble, so the order of the bubbles on the page is the one you already know. You only need to send the pages in the right order: page one first. Pages are not reordered for you beyond sorting file names.

Vertical lettering is one of the hardest cases for text recognition and it is still improving. It works best on large, clean scans.

Furigana

Furigana are the small kana printed beside kanji to show how they are read. They are tiny and sit very close to the main text, so on a low-resolution page they can blur into it and confuse recognition. A larger scan is the fix. If a line comes out garbled, check whether it carried furigana.

Honorifics and names

• Endings such as -san, -kun, -chan and -senpai may be kept, translated or dropped, depending on the engine. Machine translation is not always consistent about this from page to page.
• Character names are written in kana or kanji and are transliterated by the engine, so the same name can appear in slightly different spellings across pages.
• Slang, puns and wordplay are the weakest spot of any machine translation. Read them with that in mind.

Sound effects and text outside bubbles

Japanese sound effects are drawn large into the art. They are not translated yet and stay as drawn. The same is true for text outside speech bubbles, such as narration boxes and loose text on the art. We are working on both.

Tips for a cleaner page

• Start from the largest scan you have. Thin strokes are what tell similar characters apart.
• Avoid heavily compressed JPGs. Blocky noise around lettering is read as extra marks.
• Do not crop the edges of bubbles, and do not stitch pages together.
• Send a chapter in one job so the settings are the same for every page.
• If one page looks wrong, press Start over and add only that page again.

Common problems

• Some text is still Japanese: it is probably a sound effect or text outside a bubble. See the guide on missed text.
• The English is tiny: English can be longer than the Japanese it replaces, so it is shrunk to fit a small bubble.
• A line makes no sense: check the original for furigana, a pun or an unusual font, then try a larger scan.

Questions

• Best image quality for manga translation
• Why RuneManga misses some text on a page
• Why translated text does not fit the bubble
• Translate your first chapter