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Upload raw Japanese manga and get clean, typeset pages in English -- or Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Turkish, Indonesian, and Russian. MangaGloss reads vertical and horizontal Japanese text, removes the original cleanly, and lets you fix every bubble before you download.
Japanese manga presents unique challenges that generic translation tools struggle with. Text flows both vertically and horizontally, often within the same page. Dialogue is packed into tight speech bubbles where font size and line breaks matter. Furigana (small reading aids above kanji) can confuse standard OCR engines. Honorifics like -san, -kun, and -sensei carry social nuance that word-by-word translators lose. Handwritten sound effects are drawn directly into the art, making them hard to separate from the illustration. And manga relies heavily on implied context -- pronouns are often dropped, and the reader fills in meaning from visual cues.
Our CTD (Comic Text Detector) is trained specifically on manga layouts. It finds speech bubbles, vertical columns, narration boxes, and free-floating text with sub-pixel accuracy -- including tight layouts and overlapping text that generic OCR tools miss.
The LLM receives every text region on the page at once, not one bubble at a time. This means it understands who is speaking, preserves pronoun references (critical in Japanese where pronouns are often dropped), and handles jokes and honorifics naturally.
LaMa Large neural inpainting removes the original Japanese text and reconstructs the underlying art -- even in detailed backgrounds. The translated text is then typeset onto the clean canvas. If the AI gets a line wrong, the built-in editor lets you click the bubble, edit the text, and re-render instantly.
Define character names, attack names, honorifics, and place names once in a per-series glossary. The translation engine injects your terms into every page, so a name you set in chapter 1 stays identical in chapter 100. No more inconsistent spellings or drifting terminology.
Japanese manga uses both tategaki (vertical, right-to-left) and yokogaki (horizontal, left-to-right) text, often on the same page. Our text detector identifies the reading direction of each region and passes it to the OCR engine, so vertical columns and horizontal narration boxes are read correctly.
Furigana -- the small kana characters printed above kanji to indicate reading -- can confuse standard OCR engines into producing garbled output. Our manga-tuned OCR recognizes furigana as a separate annotation layer, reading the kanji text accurately without interference from the reading aids.
Japanese manga uses onomatopoeia extensively -- 'ドドド' for rumbling, 'ゴゴゴ' for menacing auras. Bubble-contained SFX are detected, translated, and typeset automatically. Art-integrated SFX drawn directly into illustrations are a known limitation across all tools and are on our roadmap.
Each page processes in approximately 6-10 seconds on our GPU pipeline. A typical 20-page manga chapter finishes in under 3 minutes. The pipeline runs on NVIDIA A40 GPUs for consistent performance.