Translating raw manga used to take hours of painstaking work — detecting text bubbles, running OCR, translating, cleaning artwork, and typesetting. With MangaGloss, the entire pipeline runs in under 7 seconds per page.
The Traditional Manga Translation Pipeline
Before AI translation tools, a typical scanlation workflow looked like this:
- Raw acquisition — Getting untranslated manga pages
- Translation — A bilingual translator reads each bubble and writes English equivalents
- Cleaning — A cleaner removes all Japanese text from the artwork
- Redrawing — An artist redraws any artwork that was behind the text
- Typesetting — A typesetter places English text back into the bubbles with proper fonts and sizing
- Quality check — A proofreader reviews the final result
This process takes 3–5 people and anywhere from 4 to 12 hours per chapter. For popular series with weekly releases, scanlation groups work around the clock.
How MangaGloss Automates Everything
MangaGloss replaces steps 2 through 5 with a single AI pipeline:
- Upload your raw manga pages (JPG, PNG, or WebP)
- Select source language (Japanese, Korean, or Chinese) and target language
- Click translate — our AI handles detection, OCR, translation, inpainting, and typesetting
- Download your translated pages, ready to read
What happens under the hood
When you upload a page, our GPU-accelerated pipeline runs five AI models in sequence:
- Text detection (CTD) — Locates every text region, including SFX and narration boxes
- OCR (48px model) — Reads the detected text with high accuracy
- Translation (LLM) — A large language model translates the text with context awareness
- Inpainting (LaMA Large) — Removes original text and reconstructs the artwork beneath
- Typesetting (manga2Eng) — Places translated text with proper font sizing and bubble fitting
Tips for Best Results
To get the best possible translations from MangaGloss:
- Use high-resolution scans — 1200px+ width gives the OCR model more to work with
- Upload full pages — The AI uses surrounding context for better translations
- Use the glossary — Add character names and recurring terms for consistent translations across chapters
- Try the editor — If a translation feels off, click the bubble and edit it directly
Supported Languages
MangaGloss translates from Japanese, Korean, and Chinese into 8 languages: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese (BR), Indonesian, German, Turkish, and Russian.
Ready to try it? Upload your first page free — no account needed, 30 pages per week.