Show HN: Translate Japanese manga and Korean manhwa with Chrome extension
pawakalabs.comIf you are a manga or manhwa lover, you must understand the feeling of waiting for your favourite series being translated into English or sometimes your native language.
Now, you can translate them in real-time with Fakey Chrome extension!
I recently used a different extension to translate some chapters for a pretty niche manga that'd been dropped by its scanlation team, and the results were definitely readable, but one area where it seemed to struggle a bit was with third-person pronouns (to some confusing results).
IIRC Japanese usually defaults to a generic pronoun that means "that person" rather than more specific pronouns for "he" or "she," so there were some times where I think the AI had to guess on whether "he" or "she" was the appropriate equivalent and just guessed wrong. In at least one instance it might've also been that a character was intentionally using feminine address to refer to an outwardly gay man, which could've been an interesting nuance if translated more clearly, but as things were it just left me confused.
Japanese is far worse than what you describe as far as knowing what anyone means is concerned. Japanese often omits a noun/pronoun entirely and the verb gives no hint as to what it is. In English, we have verb conjugations like “I am”, “he is”, “they are”. In Japanese the same verb is used no matter the subject. Also, “to be” is not even a verb in Japanese, and you just say the thing followed by an end of sentence particle (if you even use that). If you want to say “I am fine”, you simply say “genki (desu/da)” If you want to say someone else is fine and there is sufficient context to indicate the subject, you also just say “genki (desu/da)”.
It is even worse than what I described so far since if the topic of conversation is people’s health, someone might say “Alisu wa” to ask how Alice is and another person would reply “genki (desu/da)” to mean “Alice is well”. “Alisu wa” is just the subject. It is in that context saying “[Is] Alice [well]?”, while only saying the subject. The “wa” part marks it as a subject/topic. English has only a vestigial concept of subject forms of words in I/he/she/they/we. Japanese has much stronger concept of a word that is a subject by appending “wa” to the end of it (or “ga”, but that is a rabbit hole). Thus “Alisu wa” alone is really just saying a subject. In any case, if you are not paying attention, you might mistake the speaker as claiming to be well rather than the speaker claiming someone else is well.
Machine translation often processes text sentence by sentence. That is incapable of determining the subject in a multitude of Japanese sentences since the information needed to determine a subject is in a prior sentence spoken by another person. The machine translator thus must guess and it is often wrong. You will have better luck if you dump text into a high end LLM and ask it to translate since then it will consider prior sentences and have some idea of what each subsequent sentence actually means.
Also, Japanese does not really have more specific pronouns for he and she. Like Chinese, they only have 1 third person pronoun “kare” (he/she/it). In recent years (around the past 160 years from what I have read), it has become popular to use it mainly for males, while the word “kanojo” (girl) is used in its place for females. However, “kanojo” is not a true pronoun and is literally the noun girl. At least, whenever I read “kanojo”, I read girl, not “she”. I suspect machine translators would also read it that way, as it is what is really being said.
That said, I have studied a little Japanese, although I am far from an expert. I replied mainly because your understanding of the translation issue differs strongly from reality. I hope this reply is helpful.
Hi, I'm Adib. I hope you like my extension!
That's awesome! What's your favorite manga and what manga are you reading now?
Some copy feedback
"How does Fakey work?"
"In your dreams" (pricing)
It's cool it replaces the text in the page, makes sense, wonder if it's an overlay or literally modifies the image on the page
Maybe it uses contour finding for the speech bubbles
The other Chiyo
Is there one for Chinese light novels too? There are too many that are partly translated and I am desparate to get a different translation than one from MTNL.
How I used to dream of a technology that would one day enable this. Kudos on your release!
Does the LLM get the whole page or one speech bubble at a time?
Its over for scanlation groups and those that translate lightnovels. How will they ever recover.
Also this is a manga thread now. I will go with Oyasumi Punpun as one of the best mangas I have ever read ;)) and I recommend it to you all. Dont look up anything about it just read :)
I don't trust AI to translate anything accurately to are from a language outside of maybe Spanish and German.
There's way too much nuance in both Korean and Japanese for this to reliably work. Chinese, from my limited study is a bit closer to English in grammar and structure so that might work
If you can learn a foreign language, why not AI. Translation does not rely on grammar structure since these can be learnt. The attention model specifically designed to handle these dependencies in translation, which then led to development of AI in other tasks. You will be surprised.
For old translation systems, you are absolutely right though.
>I don't trust AI to translate anything accurately to are from a language outside of maybe Spanish and German.
But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.
>Chinese, from my limited study is a bit closer to English in grammar and structure so that might work
Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar structure, just like Japanese and Korean.
> Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar structure, just like Japanese and Korean.
This isn’t correct from what I’ve studied in both Japanese and Mandarin.
https://lptranslations.com/learn/chinese-vs-japanese/#:~:tex...
> For example, Chinese verbs are not conjugated and only have one form, whereas Japanese verbs have a wide range of conjugations and particles. Plus, Chinese is an SVO (Subject+Verb+Object) language just like English, so sentences are easier to make and interpret. Vice versa, Japanese is an SOV (Subject+Object+Verb) language, meaning you do not say: "I eat sushi" but "I sushi eat".
You're absolutely right -- though, while Mandarin’s SVO structure does align with English in basic sentences, what’s interesting is how flexible word order and grammar in general can become in practice, thanks to its reliance on context and particles rather than rigid syntax. For example:
Mandarin often moves the object to the front for emphasis, creating an OSV or SOV structure (e.g., 寿司你吃, "Sushi, you eat" or 你寿司吃了吗 "You sushi eaten?"). This isn’t true SOV grammar but highlights how meaning shifts through word order in ways English can’t replicate without rephrasing.
The nuance in Mandarin often comes from particles that take on very different meanings depending on how they are used (e.g. 了, 的) and contextual cues rather than conjugation. For instance, 吃 "eat" becomes past tense with 了 (吃了), future with 会 (会吃), or continuous with 在 (在吃)—no verb changes needed. But if you say 要吃了, it actually means future tense of "will eat soon"!
Meanwhile, Japanese relies heavily on verb conjugations (食べる→食べた) and postpositional particles (は, を) to mark grammatical roles, in a way making its structure more rigid and easier to interpret. Personally I found Tae Kim's interpretation of "Japanese isn't SOV, it's actually V!" to be useful.
Both languages share subject-drop tendencies (like omitting "I" or "you" when contextually clear), and compound-word formation in both languages from the use of Chinese characters (kanji) adds another layer of contextual interpretation.
>But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.
Just because neither are perfect doesn't mean they are equally bad, though.
>But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you perfect, professional-level translations.
I often prefer fan level over professional level because they are targeting different audience. As far as quality goes, there is a range and sometimes I skip something because the quality is too low, but I see plenty that does a good enough job.
Part of it is that there is no such thing as a perfect translation because there isn't an exact equivalent in another language. For someone with no knowledge of the original culture or language, there is some translations that will probably work best, but the more one knows about the language and culture, even a small amount picked up just from consuming other items, the the more likely a different translation works better. For a definite concrete example, how should one handle honorifics like chan, san, and kun.
I think this isn't about subtle nuances but blatant errors that require full multimodal input to notice. Most MTLs(including LLMs) are done by divorcing text from content and processing it in CSV-like lists, and there's just not enough data in text by itself. This routinely lead to outputs doing something completely different from input.
Not in manga space, but Microsoft had been notorious for nonchalantly shipping crazy MTL errors for past 3-5 years, e.g. "Copilot Child Adoption Kit", "Reply in cost estimate", or "Print in scenery". For manga and entertainments, more likely modes of errors would be wildly fluctuating pronouns, genders, personas, formalities almost in styles of Monty Python satire.
These are less likely to manifest with language pairs that are closer together like English and German, and less likely with human translators who can trivially go through pages to read with full context and/or write with consistency.
Tbf a lot of translators are also really bad. Not sure if you've heard the story of Jojo and Duwang.
>Its over for scanlation groups and those that translate lightnovels.
I think it might be a tad premature to say it's over for them.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, one of the more recent lightnovels I've been reading (via "Slime Reader") has an extremely noticeable drop in quality when they moved to machine translations (and that's with post-translation editing).
However, the speed at which things can be translated is a huge positive, and I'm sure translation tech will get better, so it's probably just a matter of time.
Oyasumi Punpun is amazing but I would definitely posit that is a deep and emotional story before recommending it to someone.
Isn’t scanlation kind of dead already? Afaik, every major manga get released in English weekly/monthly, and almost everything else is officially translated.
Not at all.
Good to know! I guess I had the wrong impression of the scene.
I have always had huge respect for both manga and anime translation groups.
if it improves over the dreadful Baki scanlations.... shudder
LOL, I read manga for laughing, not for depression ...
solo leveling no contest
the anime's been great, not a manga reader myself
It's a korean web toon so the art is fantastic. The art gets no justice in the Anime.
Come on, the anime has insane art and animation. They are kicking the ball out of the park, especially with S2.
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