Show HN: Translate Japanese manga and Korean manhwa with Chrome extension
29 comments
·March 9, 2025spondylosaurus
I recently used a different extension to translate some chapters for a pretty niche manga that'd been dropped by its scanlation team, and the results were definitely readable, but one area where it seemed to struggle a bit was with third-person pronouns (to some confusing results).
IIRC Japanese usually defaults to a generic pronoun that means "that person" rather than more specific pronouns for "he" or "she," so there were some times where I think the AI had to guess on whether "he" or "she" was the appropriate equivalent and just guessed wrong. In at least one instance it might've also been that a character was intentionally using feminine address to refer to an outwardly gay man, which could've been an interesting nuance if translated more clearly, but as things were it just left me confused.
babuloseo
Its over for scanlation groups and those that translate lightnovels. How will they ever recover.
Also this is a manga thread now. I will go with Oyasumi Punpun as one of the best mangas I have ever read ;)) and I recommend it to you all. Dont look up anything about it just read :)
999900000999
I don't trust AI to translate anything accurately to are from a language outside of maybe Spanish and German.
There's way too much nuance in both Korean and Japanese for this to reliably work. Chinese, from my limited study is a bit closer to English in grammar and structure so that might work
thirdacc
>I don't trust AI to translate anything accurately to are from a language outside of maybe Spanish and German.
But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.
>Chinese, from my limited study is a bit closer to English in grammar and structure so that might work
Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar structure, just like Japanese and Korean.
999900000999
> Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar structure, just like Japanese and Korean.
This isn’t correct from what I’ve studied in both Japanese and Mandarin.
https://lptranslations.com/learn/chinese-vs-japanese/#:~:tex...
> For example, Chinese verbs are not conjugated and only have one form, whereas Japanese verbs have a wide range of conjugations and particles. Plus, Chinese is an SVO (Subject+Verb+Object) language just like English, so sentences are easier to make and interpret. Vice versa, Japanese is an SOV (Subject+Object+Verb) language, meaning you do not say: "I eat sushi" but "I sushi eat".
ziddoap
>But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.
Just because neither are perfect doesn't mean they are equally bad, though.
SkyBelow
>But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.
I often prefer fan level over professional level because they are targeting different audience. As far as quality goes, there is a range and sometimes I skip something because the quality is too low, but I see plenty that does a good enough job.
Part of it is that there is no such thing as a perfect translation because there isn't an exact equivalent in another language. For someone with no knowledge of the original culture or language, there is some translations that will probably work best, but the more one knows about the language and culture, even a small amount picked up just from consuming other items, the the more likely a different translation works better. For a definite concrete example, how should one handle honorifics like chan, san, and kun.
numpad0
I think this isn't about subtle nuances but blatant errors that require full multimodal input to notice. Most MTLs(including LLMs) are done by divorcing text from content and processing it in CSV-like lists, and there's just not enough data in text by itself. This routinely lead to outputs doing something completely different from input.
Not in manga space, but Microsoft had been notorious for nonchalantly shipping crazy MTL errors for past 3-5 years, e.g. "Copilot Child Adoption Kit", "Reply in cost estimate", or "Print in scenery". For manga and entertainments, more likely modes of errors would be wildly fluctuating pronouns, genders, personas, formalities almost in styles of Monty Python satire.
These are less likely to manifest with language pairs that are closer together like English and German, and less likely with human translators who can trivially go through pages to read with full context and/or write with consistency.
yamazakiwi
Tbf a lot of translators are also really bad. Not sure if you've heard the story of Jojo and Duwang.
null
ziddoap
>Its over for scanlation groups and those that translate lightnovels.
I think it might be a tad premature to say it's over for them.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, one of the more recent lightnovels I've been reading (via "Slime Reader") has an extremely noticeable drop in quality when they moved to machine translations (and that's with post-translation editing).
However, the speed at which things can be translated is a huge positive, and I'm sure translation tech will get better, so it's probably just a matter of time.
yamazakiwi
Oyasumi Punpun is amazing but I would definitely posit that is a deep and emotional story before recommending it to someone.
Cyph0n
Isn’t scanlation kind of dead already? Afaik, every major manga get released in English weekly/monthly, and almost everything else is officially translated.
sergiotapia
if it improves over the dreadful Baki scanlations.... shudder
degurechaff
LOL, I read manga for laughing, not for depression ...
adibzaini
Hi, I'm Adib. I hope you like my extension!
ohm
That's awesome! What's your favorite manga and what manga are you reading now?
boredhedgehog
Does the LLM get the whole page or one speech bubble at a time?
ge96
Some copy feedback
"How does Fakey work?"
"In your dreams" (pricing)
It's cool it replaces the text in the page, makes sense, wonder if it's an overlay or literally modifies the image on the page
Maybe it uses contour finding for the speech bubbles
The other Chiyo
vaidhy
Is there one for Chinese light novels too? There are too many that are partly translated and I am desparate to get a different translation than one from MTNL.
educasean
How I used to dream of a technology that would one day enable this. Kudos on your release!
sharps_xp
solo leveling no contest
ge96
the anime's been great, not a manga reader myself
yamazakiwi
It's a korean web toon so the art is fantastic. The art gets no justice in the Anime.
Cyph0n
Come on, the anime has insane art and animation. They are kicking the ball out of the park, especially with S2.
null
If you are a manga or manhwa lover, you must understand the feeling of waiting for your favourite series being translated into English or sometimes your native language.
Now, you can translate them in real-time with Fakey Chrome extension!