Translate Manga to English with the honorifics intact

Japanese to English is the pair this was built around first, and it is the one with the most going on: text set vertically, panels running right to left, and a layer of politeness in the grammar that English has no direct equivalent for. Translate manga to English here and all three are handled rather than flattened.

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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.

Three things Japanese does that English does not

Order

The text runs downward, and the page runs right to left

Japanese comic lettering is usually set vertically, top to bottom, and the balloons are read right to left across the page. A tool that reads horizontally finds fragments; one that sorts balloons left to right hands you a conversation in reverse. Getting that order right is the first thing it takes to translate manga to English.

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Honorifics are information

Whether a character is -san, -kun, -chan, -senpai or nothing at all tells you the relationship, and a change mid-story is usually the point of a scene. They are preserved where they carry meaning rather than dropped in the name of natural English. Anything that claims to translate manga to English while deleting them is handing you a flatter story than the one that was written.

Grammar

Subjects are frequently left out

Japanese omits the subject when context supplies it. English cannot. Getting "she" instead of "he" three balloons later is the most common way an attempt to translate manga quietly goes wrong, which is why lines are read with the surrounding balloons as context rather than one at a time.

Pages read in English

Left is the Japanese page as uploaded, right is what came back.

Vertical lettering read as whole sentences, balloons taken in reading order — what it looks like to translate manga to English without losing the page.

The arena opening, eight balloons across a crowd
Translated
The arena opening, eight balloons across a crowd
Uploaded
A crowded openingeight balloons over a packed arena.
Japanese page with character names and painted-in applause
Translated
Japanese page with character names and painted-in applause
Uploaded
Introductions in orderread as one conversation, not eight separate lines.
Japanese page with curved sound effects and inverted balloons
Translated
Japanese page with curved sound effects and inverted balloons
Uploaded
Inverted balloonswhite-on-black stays white-on-black.
A sparse page: one thought balloon on a wide panel
Translated
A sparse page: one thought balloon on a wide panel
Uploaded
The hard caseone thought balloon, almost no context to work from.

Drag any handle to compare. Every right-hand page is our own output. · Pepper&Carrot by David Revoy — CC BY 4.0

A raw page, read in English

1

Add the page or the chapter

A single image, or the whole chapter as CBZ, ZIP, PDF or EPUB. Multi-page files are unpacked in order, so a downloaded chapter keeps its sequence without renaming. A single file or a whole archive is the same drop.

2

Confirm the direction

Right to left is selected automatically for Japanese, which is what decides the order balloons are read in. If you are working with a page laid out the Western way, switch it.

3

Balloons are read and re-lettered

Vertical text inside each balloon is read as one line rather than a column of characters, translated with its neighbours for context, and set back into the balloon it came from.

4

Keep going to the next chapter

Names, honorifics and recurring terms you have fixed are held in your glossary and reused, so chapter twelve calls everyone what chapter one called them. Translate manga across a series and the names hold.

The parts that decide whether you can actually read it

01

Vertical text is one line, not a stack

A balloon of vertical Japanese is a sentence written downward. Read as separate characters or separate lines it becomes nonsense that happens to contain the right words. Vertical lettering is joined back into whole sentences before anything is used to translate manga.

02

Sound effects are read where they are

Japanese sound effects are drawn into the art and carry a lot of the atmosphere. They are read and translated, and left in place rather than scrubbed off the drawing. Nothing is lifted off the drawing to translate manga into a cleaner-looking page.

03

Furigana does not become dialogue

The small reading guides printed beside kanji are pronunciation aids, not speech. They are treated as such instead of being translated into the balloon as extra words. Furigana pulled into the line is another way to translate manga into noise.

04

Names stay spelled the same way

Japanese names have more than one defensible romanisation. Fix one and every later chapter uses it, which is what stops a long series turning into three spellings of the same character. It is the difference between a series you can follow and one you re-learn each time you translate manga from it.

Whatever form the raws arrived in

01

Single images

JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and HEIC. A screenshot from a phone and a scan from a book are both fine; sharper and flatter reads more reliably than a photo taken at an angle under a lamp. Enough to translate manga from a single screenshot.

02

Whole chapters

CBZ, ZIP, PDF and EPUB are unpacked and read in page order, so a chapter you downloaded as an archive keeps its sequence without you renaming anything or uploading pages one at a time. Page order is taken from the archive, so a chapter you translate manga from arrives in sequence.

03

Mixed uploads

A folder of loose pages plus an archive in the same run is handled as one job. Everything is counted the same way — by the page — so there is no advantage to splitting a chapter up or bundling it first. Mixed uploads translate manga in one queue.

04

What comes back

The same pages, same resolution, artwork untouched, with the English set into the balloons it belongs in. Download them individually or as one archive. The files you get back are the ones you uploaded, with the balloons in English.

What this pass will not touch

Japanese to English is the pair with the most going on, and most of the quality comes from what is deliberately left alone when you translate manga.

This is for the chapters running ahead of an official release, or the ones that will never see one.

The line arrives as it was written

A joke that works because two Japanese words sound alike comes back as its meaning. Rewriting the gag into an English one that lands is authorship, and no automatic pass should be doing that silently on your behalf — it is the single thing fan translations are argued over. To translate manga faithfully is to hand you the line the character said, in order, not a replacement for it.

Speech quirks are kept where the grammar marks them

A character speaking Kansai dialect, or one with a verbal tic that defines them, is marked in grammar rather than vocabulary. Where the source states the register explicitly it is carried across; where it does not, the line comes back in plain English rather than in an accent invented for it. Nothing is faked to sound characterful.

Your Japanese page is left as it was

The file you uploaded is never modified, so you keep the raw and the English beside each other. That is the whole point if you translate manga to read along rather than only to follow the plot — check yourself against the original balloon, then turn the page.

A cleaner scan reads better every time

Older raws carry halftone dots, JPEG artefacts from a dozen resaves, and lettering that has softened into the background. The text is still found in most cases, and this is the one variable on your side of the upload: hand it a cleaner scan of the same page and it comes back sharper. Where a clean copy of a chapter exists, it is worth the extra minute.

Answers

Questions about translating manga to English

That works. Sharper and flatter is better — a curved page near the spine or a heavy shadow makes the lettering harder to isolate, and you may find a balloon needs correcting afterwards. A photo is enough to translate manga from, though a clean scan reads better.

Kept where they carry meaning. They are one of the clearest signals of how characters stand relative to each other, and dropping them for smoother English throws that away.

Yes. Upload a CBZ, ZIP, PDF or EPUB and every page is processed in order. A twenty-page chapter costs twenty pages of credit, with no batch fee. Drop in the archive and it will translate manga page by page, in order.

The pipeline is built for reading Japanese, Korean and Chinese comics. English to Japanese is not what this page is for.

Good enough to follow a story comfortably, and not a substitute for a professional translation. Plot, dialogue and tone come through; wordplay and dialect do not.

Not to try it. Two pages run without one at full resolution. An account is what makes the glossary persist between chapters.

Because Japanese usually leaves the subject out and English has to supply one. When the balloon alone does not say who is being talked about, the surrounding balloons decide — right most of the time. On the paid plans you can correct that balloon and re-letter just that line.

Yes, and it is worth doing early. Set the spelling once in your glossary and every later chapter uses it. Doing it in chapter one saves correcting the same name forty times over a long series.

Translate manga to English on a page you already have

Two pages, no account. Check the balloon order and the pronouns — those are where an attempt to translate manga to English shows whether it understood the page.