Translate Japanese Manga to English in seconds with Mantra Engine AI

Photo from Darya Sannikova/Pexels

Reading manga has never been more convenient as Mantra, a Japanese tech firm, released an AI program that translates Japanese comics or manga into English.

Striving to facilitate the distribution of manga titles worldwide by reducing translation time, Mantra aims for the app to act as a way to prevent readers from pirating comics.

Co-founder and CEO Ishiwatari Shonosuke said, “This system has already been adopted by more than 10 companies in Japan and overseas.”

University of Tokyo’s AI research graduates recognize the widespread popularity of manga. Unfortunately, pirated translations continue to circulate because of two reasons: it takes a long time to translate the latest titles and only a few comics have English translations.

Subsequently, Ishiwatari and his colleagues developed a way to make it easier to translate Japanese comics. Using artificial intelligence to create a translation system called Mantra Engine produces highly accurate and natural-sounding text from Japanese text.

Mantra AI — Photo from Lisa Fotios/Pexels

Just imagine how great it is that it produces results in an instant—within seconds! Considering modern AI chatbots and the Japanese language, this truly revolutionizes the game.

ChatGPT, despite being the most popular Ai chatbot nowadays, is still prone to grammatical errors. On the other hand, the Japanese language, or Nihongo, is vastly different from the English language.

This signifies just how great Mantra Engine pulled it off. Thank the company’s chief technology officer Hinami Ryota. He and the other researchers found a way for their app to match Japanese symbols with English text.

In addition, it translates the words in a way that reads like regular English speech. CEO Ishiwatari noted how it could quell manga piracy, “If we heighten the efficiency and release translated versions without any time lag, we can prevent pirated manga translations from emerging.….”

“…One pirate translation group has already announced that they will no longer produce titles that have been translated and released through our system,” he added.

Knowing the limitations of Mantra Engine, they included options to edit the translation. Words, font, font size, orientation, and other settings, may be changed.

Mantra Engine also has a glossary that truly helps as it can implement user preferences. Also, manga creation is a team effort, so the AI tool lets users communicate with colleagues.

Manga-readers, are you excited about this advancement in technology? Sound off in the comments below!

Raphael Garcia

Raphael is a person born between the generations of Millenial and Gen Z. He was produced by Cavite State University (Main Campus) with a bachelor's degree in Political Science. The lad has a fresh take on things, but can still stay true to his roots. He writes anything in Pop Culture as long as it suits his taste (if it doesn't, it's for work). He loves to wander around the cosmos and comes back with a story to publish.