How to Translate Manga: A 2026 Guide
Translating a manga page is not one job. It is four, and each one fails differently.
1. Find the text
Before anything can be translated, something has to decide where the text is. Speech bubbles are the easy case: high-contrast black on white, usually enclosed by a clean outline. Narration boxes are nearly as easy. The hard cases are text drawn over artwork, hand-lettered sound effects, and small furigana sitting alongside the main line.
Detection returns regions, not characters. A good detector groups the lines inside one bubble into a single block. A bad one returns each line separately — and then every downstream step treats a single sentence as three unrelated fragments.
2. Read it (OCR)
Japanese OCR has to handle vertical text, which most general-purpose OCR does not. It also has to handle furigana: the small kana printed beside a kanji to give its reading. If furigana is read as independent text, you get duplicated, garbled output and the system will try to fit a translation into a space a few pixels tall.
Furigana should be merged into the main line as pronunciation information, never translated on its own.
3. Translate with the whole page in view
This is where most tools quietly fail. A sentence-by-sentence translation engine sees "行ってきます" with no idea who is speaking, who they are speaking to, or what happened in the previous panel. Japanese leans heavily on context that is simply absent at the sentence level — dropped subjects, politeness levels that shift with relationships, and slang that only resolves once you know the characters.
Sending the whole page at once, with the reading order preserved, fixes most of this. It also keeps names and honorifics consistent across bubbles instead of drifting from panel to panel.
4. Remove the original and typeset the translation
The last step is the one readers actually see. The original text has to be removed without destroying the bubble outline, its tail, or the artwork behind it — that means masking the glyphs, not painting a white rectangle over the whole region.
Then the translation goes back in. English set horizontally into a bubble drawn for vertical Japanese rarely fits on the first try, so the text has to wrap and the size has to adapt. When it genuinely will not fit, the honest move is to leave the original and flag it, rather than shrink the text past readability or silently rewrite the line to something shorter.
What to expect
Printed dialogue on clean backgrounds works well today. Hand-drawn sound effects integrated into the artwork are a different problem — closer to illustration than to text — and most tools, including ours, leave them alone.
If a tool claims to handle everything perfectly, check what it does with a page full of sound effects before you believe it.