Why RuneManga misses some text on a page

RuneManga misses text mainly in four situations: the text sits outside a speech bubble, it is a sound effect, the image is too small or blurry to read, or the lettering is in an unusual font. The first two are not translated yet, by design and by timeline. The last two usually improve with a better image.

Text outside speech bubbles

Narration boxes, captions, signs and loose text written straight onto the art are not translated yet. They can stay in the original language, or in some cases be left partly untouched. This is common in webtoons, where a lot of text sits right on the picture. It is the biggest gap in the current version.

Sound effects

Sound effects such as bangs, footsteps and screams are drawn as part of the artwork. We leave them as drawn on purpose: translating them well needs care, and a wrong guess ruins the page. Dialogue is the priority. An option for sound effects may come later.

Low resolution and blur

If the image is small, blurry or heavily compressed, the strokes that tell characters apart are gone. The text is either not found or read as something else. This is the most fixable cause: use a bigger, less compressed image of the same page.

Unusual fonts and handwriting

• Decorative title lettering and stylized fonts used for emphasis are hard to read.
• Handwritten lettering varies a lot and is easy to misread.
• Very small text such as furigana or footnotes can disappear into the page.
• Text that is tilted, curved or running along a path is harder to find than text in a straight block.

Busy backgrounds

Text on top of screentone, gradients or detailed art is harder to find, and harder to erase cleanly. You might see faint ghost marks where the old lettering was, even when the text itself was translated.

Other causes

• Wrong source language. Auto-detect can guess wrong on a page with little text.
• Two pages joined into one tall image. Send pages separately.
• Mixed languages on one page, such as English words in a Japanese bubble.
• Cropped bubbles at the edge of the page.
• Low contrast, such as pale lettering on a tinted or textured background, or text printed on a dark panel.
• Pages that are scanned crooked or rotated, so that the lines of text are far from straight.

How to tell which case you have

• Text inside a bubble is still in the original language: usually a resolution or a font problem.
• Text outside a bubble is still in the original language: a known gap.
• Large, stylized lettering drawn like art is untouched: a sound effect, left as drawn.
• The text was translated into nonsense: it was misread. See the guide on image quality.

Will this improve?

Yes. Translating text outside bubbles is the next big piece we are working on. Sound effects stay as drawn by choice, and an option to translate them may come later. Recognition for Korean and Chinese is improving too. This guide will change when they do.

What to try, in order

1. Look at what was missed. Is it in a bubble? If not, it is a known gap.
2. Look for a bigger, cleaner image of the same page.
3. Set the source language instead of Auto-detect.
4. Press Start over, add only that page and run it again.
5. If a bubble with clean, large text was missed, tell us.

Tell us about it

Write to [email protected] with the language pair and what kind of text was missed. Please do not send pages you do not have the right to share.

Questions

• Best image quality for manga translation
• Why translated text does not fit the bubble
• How to translate manhwa and webtoons to English