Building MyMangaList: Exploring AI Assisted manga translation

A developer is building MyMangaList, a manga discovery and reading project, and exploring the technical challenges of AI-assisted manga translation. The project aims to make it easier for readers to explore different manga titles, with translation being a key technical hurdle due to the complexity of Japanese-to-English conversion in manga.

Manga translation is much more complicated than simply converting Japanese text into English. A manga page can contain dialogue, narration, sound effect, character names, text with very little context, and multiple speech bubbles whose meaning depends on the surrounding panels. That's one of the problem I've been exploring while building MyMangaList. What is MyMangaList? MyMangaList is a manga discovery and reading project designed to make it easier for the reader to explore different manga title and find something new to read. But one of the more interesting technical challenges behind the project is manga translation.