Japanese manga translator you can actually edit

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.

Translate a Japanese page free

Why Japanese manga is hard to translate

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.

How MangaGloss handles it

Manga-tuned text detection

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.

Full-page context translation

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.

Clean inpainting + editor

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.

Per-series glossary

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.

Technical details for Japanese manga

Vertical and horizontal text

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 handling

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.

Sound effects (SFX)

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.

Processing speed

The GPU pipeline translates and typesets a page in seconds, then a quality check re-checks every bubble, so most pages are ready in under a minute. Pages run in parallel, so a typical 20-page chapter is usually done in a few minutes.

Who uses a Japanese manga translator?

  • Translation teams shipping weekly chapters who need fast first drafts with an editor for QC
  • Japanese learners who want to check their own reading comprehension against a machine translation
  • Indie creators localizing JP-style manga into English, Spanish, French, and other languages
  • Publishers and agencies needing volume translation with consistent terminology via glossaries

Watch: Japanese manga to English

Best Manga Translator? An Honest AI Test, Timed (2026) · Chapters & transcript

Raw manga to English in 6 seconds

All MangaGloss videos →

Common questions

Does it read vertical text?
Yes -- both vertical (tategaki) and horizontal (yokogaki) Japanese text are supported. Our manga-tuned text detector identifies the reading direction of each text region automatically, so vertical columns in speech bubbles and horizontal narration boxes are both read and translated correctly.
Can I fix a wrong translation?
Yes. The built-in editor lets you click any bubble in the translated page, edit the text, adjust font size and placement, and re-render the page instantly. This is useful for fixing nuanced dialogue, wordplay, or names the AI did not catch from the glossary.
What about sound effects baked into the art?
Dialogue and bubble text are detected and translated automatically. SFX contained in speech bubbles are also handled. Art-integrated sound effects (onomatopoeia drawn directly into the illustration, like 'ドドド') are a known limitation across every manga translation tool today and are on our development roadmap.
How accurate is Japanese-to-English translation?
We use a premium LLM with full-page context, so most dialogue reads naturally. The model handles honorifics, implied pronouns, and conversational Japanese well. For nuanced phrasing, cultural references, or wordplay, the built-in editor lets you adjust any line. Adding character names and terms to the glossary further improves accuracy for recurring series.
Can I use a glossary for character names?
Yes. The per-series glossary lets you lock character names, attack names, honorifics, and place names. For example, you can ensure '炭治郎' is always rendered as 'Tanjirou' rather than 'Tanjiro' or 'Tanjirō'. Terms are injected into the LLM prompt for every page, keeping translations consistent across an entire series.

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Try it on a Japanese page

5 free pages a day, no account required to start.

Translate a Japanese page free
Japanese Manga Translator | MangaGloss