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Add the pages
Single images, a whole issue as CBZ or ZIP, or a PDF. Page order comes from the file, so a scanned issue stays in sequence.
Comic Translator that reads tiers in order
Western comics are laid out on assumptions no Japanese or Korean tool makes. Panels run left to right in tiers, narration lives in square boxes that are not speech, and the lettering is set in capitals with its own conventions. A comic translator has to handle all three before it has handled anything, and this one translates into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and English.
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JPG · PNG · WebP · AVIF · HEIC · PDF · EPUB · CBZ · ZIP — a single page or a whole chapter. Your first 2 pages are on us, no account needed.
Why a manga tool mangles a comic page
Tools built for manga carry a set of defaults that are correct for manga and wrong here.
The reading direction is reversed, the balloon shapes are less regular, and a large share of the words on the page are not dialogue at all. A comic translator that ignores those three facts produces output that is technically translated and practically unreadable.
Order
Panels run the other way
Manga reads right to left, so a manga-first tool will hand you a page whose dialogue is in reverse. Western pages are read left to right in tiers, and irregular panel layouts — a tall panel spanning two rows, an inset in a corner — have to be resolved into that order rather than sorted by position alone. A comic translator has to sort balloons into tiers, left to right, before it reads a word of them.
Structure
Narration is not speech
Caption boxes carry narration, internal monologue or a time-and-place title. They are square, often coloured, and they read in a different voice from the dialogue around them. Merging them into the balloon stream produces a page where the narrator interrupts a conversation. They are kept as their own thread. Keeping captions apart from speech is the single clearest test of whether a comic translator understands the format.
Craft
The lettering has its own rules
Comic lettering is traditionally all capitals, letterspaced by hand, with bold and italic doing work that punctuation does elsewhere. Emphasis is preserved, and the replacement lettering follows the same conventions instead of dropping sentence-case text into a balloon shaped for capitals.
A page in, a page out
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Set left-to-right reading
This is the default for Western sources, and it is the setting that decides the order in which the balloons on a page are read and re-lettered. Getting it wrong is the single most common reason automated comic output reads like nonsense.
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Balloons, captions and effects are separated
Each is found and handled as its own kind of text. Dialogue is translated in conversational order, captions keep their narrative voice, and sound effects are treated as art rather than as sentences to be replaced with prose.
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Download the issue
The translated pages come back with the artwork untouched, in the same order and format you supplied, ready to read or to pass on.
European pages, run through the comic translator
Three pages in the language Pepper&Carrot is written in, straight out of the comic translator.
The balloons change; CRACK, KLONK and PLONK stay drawn on the artwork where they belong.
Drag any handle to compare. Every right-hand page is our own output. · Pepper&Carrot by David Revoy — CC BY 4.0
What separates a readable comic translator from a mess
Balloon tails still point at the right mouth
A balloon is matched to its tail before anything is written into it, so a two-person exchange in one panel does not end up swapped. Reversed dialogue is the failure readers spot instantly and never forgive. It is the check worth running first on any comic translator you are trying.
Emphasis survives the trip
Bold and italic in comic lettering are doing the job that stress does in speech. They are carried into the translated line rather than flattened into uniform text.
Long words get room
German and Portuguese routinely need more space than the English they replace. Lettering is fitted to the balloon that already exists, so a long word breaks and sets rather than running past the outline.
One issue at a time, consistently
Character names, place names and invented terminology are held in a glossary that carries across the whole issue and into the next one, which is what keeps a serialised title coherent. That glossary is what makes this a comic translator for a run rather than for a page.
What a letterer would want left alone
Western comics carry a century of lettering convention, and most of the judgement in re-lettering one is judgement about restraint.
A comic translator earns its keep on what it refuses to touch. These are the calls made on your behalf, and why each one goes the way it does.
Balloon shape and panel order are the artwork
A letterer choosing balloon shapes, breaking lines for rhythm and drawing a font that belongs to one particular book is doing design work, and it is part of what you bought. Text is set into the balloon it came from, sized to fit it, following the conventions of the form — the page keeps its shape and its reading order, tier by tier.
Sound effects stay where the artist drew them
In Western comics the effects are often the most designed element on the page: integrated into the panel, coloured, sometimes holding the composition together. Removing one to make room for a translated word damages the art. They are read and translated for you, and left exactly in place. A comic translator that scrubs them off has thrown away the loudest thing on the page.
Meaning first, in language you read today
Comic dialogue leans hard on idiom, and an older book is written in the register of its decade. The translation hands you what the line means in contemporary English, which is what you need to follow a story printed before you were reading. The period voice is preserved where the page marks it rather than being imitated.
Paper and colour are left as scanned
Nothing is whitened, sharpened or de-screened on the way through. A scan of a printed comic keeps its paper tone and its halftone, because a comic translator that cleans the page up is making a restoration decision on a book it has never seen. What changes is the lettering inside the balloon and nothing else.
Answers
Comic translator questions
Left to right by default for Western comics, and you can switch it. This setting is what determines balloon order on a page, so it matters more than any other choice on the form.
Yes. English into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German or Indonesian is the common direction here, and it works the same way as translating into English.
Each one is read and translated for you, then left where it was drawn. Removing them would mean repainting the artwork underneath, which does more damage than leaving an effect legible where the artist drew it.
Yes. Drop in a CBZ, ZIP or PDF and every page is processed in order. A twenty-page issue costs twenty pages of credit, with no separate batch fee.
The Studio plan and the largest page pack include a commercial licence for what the tool produces. That covers our output only — it grants no rights to the artwork you uploaded. Everything the comic translator produces is yours to read either way.
Yes, though the scan quality sets the ceiling. Clean digital art gives the cleanest read; a scan with visible halftone dots, a curved gutter or ink bleed makes the lettering harder to isolate, and you may find a balloon or two need editing afterwards. Hand the comic translator a cleaner scan and the same page comes back sharper.
Download both. The source page you uploaded is untouched, so keeping the pair side by side is a matter of saving the original and the output together — useful when you are checking a line you are unsure about.
Run one page through the comic translator
Check the panel order and the caption boxes first. Those are what a general image translator gets wrong, and what a real comic translator has to get right. Two pages on us, no account.