6 ms·

Show HN: Translate Japanese manga and Korean manhwa with Chrome extension

40 points by adibzaini 2y ago

If 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!

adibzaini 2y ago
Hi, I'm Adib. I hope you like my extension!
- ohm 2y ago
  That's awesome! What's your favorite manga and what manga are you reading now?
educasean 2y ago
How I used to dream of a technology that would one day enable this. Kudos on your release!
- adibzaini 2y ago
  Thanks!
boredhedgehog 2y ago
Does the LLM get the whole page or one speech bubble at a time?
- adibzaini 2y ago
  One at a time. Passing the whole page is better for understanding the context but the cost increased significantly
appleaday1 2y ago
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 :)
- yamazakiwi 2y ago
  Oyasumi Punpun is amazing but I would definitely posit that is a deep and emotional story before recommending it to someone.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  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
  - yamazakiwi 2y ago
    Tbf a lot of translators are also really bad. Not sure if you've heard the story of Jojo and Duwang.
  - thirdacc 2y ago
    >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.
    - 999900000999 2y ago
      > 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/#:~:text=Plus%2C%20Chinese%20is%20an%20SVO,but%20%22I%20sushi%20eat%22. 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".
ge96 2y ago
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
- adibzaini 2y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! It uses overlay. Tried to render the text directly on the image but it is two to three times slower.
sharps_xp 2y ago
solo leveling no contest
- ge96 2y ago
  the anime's been great, not a manga reader myself
  - yamazakiwi 2y ago
    It's a korean web toon so the art is fantastic. The art gets no justice in the Anime.
    - Cyph0n 2y ago
      Come on, the anime has insane art and animation. They are kicking the ball out of the park, especially with S2.
      - yamazakiwi 2y ago
        I haven't seen season 2, and I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying the web toon looks incredible.
vaidhy 2y ago
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.
- adibzaini 2y ago
  You can check out sugoi toolkit.. not sure they support Chinese
spondylosaurus 2y ago
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.
- ryao 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ingobernables 2y ago
[dead]
casey2 2y ago
>よつば >よっば Just the fact that it misrecognizes this character means at least 10% of it's translations are going to be nonsense. That the creator puts this video up as a demo doesn't instill any confidence. For any real translation app you will need something like deep research with a much longer context window and a much lower hallucination rate, better FIR and a slate with the input words and your confidence in them. Arguably a conscious robot is required. Until OCR is a solved problem manga won't be a solved problem, and even then because I guarantee there is more wacky shit in comic books than in government and corporate documents, it still won't be 90% and that's just OCR If you actually understood the scope of the problem, and were acting rationally, you would just go learn japanese. Of course if you compare current AI to bad localization you can say it's a million times faster and more accurate even though in reality it's worth than any bilingual person reading it and reporting the meaning. As I ramble perhaps pretraining with "this is the meaning" at various clause, sentence, paragraph and page levels for every popular or useful media will make Gemini or ChatGPT seem like magic.
- ryao 2y ago
  よつば = yotsuba よっば = yobba As someone who has tried learning Japanese, it took me longer than I am willing to admit that to realize the two were different and things made much more sense after I realized the difference. That said, learning Japanese is an extremely slow process and even if one does learn enough to understand a novel, one’s reading speed will be extremely slow, even if one is lucky enough to remember enough that it is not necessary to use a dictionary every other kanji. Even upon learning Japanese, it is quite tempting to dump the text into a LLM to have it translated.
- adibzaini 2y ago
  Thank you for your feedback! I will try to improve the OCR and also the problem with understanding context.

40 points by adibzaini 2y ago

adibzaini 2y ago

Hi, I'm Adib. I hope you like my extension!

ohm 2y ago
That's awesome! What's your favorite manga and what manga are you reading now?

educasean 2y ago

How I used to dream of a technology that would one day enable this. Kudos on your release!

adibzaini 2y ago
Thanks!

boredhedgehog 2y ago

Does the LLM get the whole page or one speech bubble at a time?

adibzaini 2y ago
One at a time. Passing the whole page is better for understanding the context but the cost increased significantly

appleaday1 2y ago

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 :)

yamazakiwi 2y ago
Oyasumi Punpun is amazing but I would definitely posit that is a deep and emotional story before recommending it to someone.
999900000999 2y ago
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
- yamazakiwi 2y ago
  Tbf a lot of translators are also really bad. Not sure if you've heard the story of Jojo and Duwang.
- thirdacc 2y ago
  >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.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    > 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/#:~:text=Plus%2C%20Chinese%20is%20an%20SVO,but%20%22I%20sushi%20eat%22. 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".

ge96 2y ago

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

adibzaini 2y ago
Thanks for the feedback! It uses overlay. Tried to render the text directly on the image but it is two to three times slower.

sharps_xp 2y ago

solo leveling no contest

ge96 2y ago
the anime's been great, not a manga reader myself
- yamazakiwi 2y ago
  It's a korean web toon so the art is fantastic. The art gets no justice in the Anime.
  - Cyph0n 2y ago
    Come on, the anime has insane art and animation. They are kicking the ball out of the park, especially with S2.
    - yamazakiwi 2y ago
      I haven't seen season 2, and I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying the web toon looks incredible.

vaidhy 2y ago

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.

adibzaini 2y ago
You can check out sugoi toolkit.. not sure they support Chinese

spondylosaurus 2y ago

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.

ryao 2y ago
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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ingobernables 2y ago

[dead]

casey2 2y ago

>よつば >よっば Just the fact that it misrecognizes this character means at least 10% of it's translations are going to be nonsense. That the creator puts this video up as a demo doesn't instill any confidence. For any real translation app you will need something like deep research with a much longer context window and a much lower hallucination rate, better FIR and a slate with the input words and your confidence in them. Arguably a conscious robot is required. Until OCR is a solved problem manga won't be a solved problem, and even then because I guarantee there is more wacky shit in comic books than in government and corporate documents, it still won't be 90% and that's just OCR If you actually understood the scope of the problem, and were acting rationally, you would just go learn japanese. Of course if you compare current AI to bad localization you can say it's a million times faster and more accurate even though in reality it's worth than any bilingual person reading it and reporting the meaning. As I ramble perhaps pretraining with "this is the meaning" at various clause, sentence, paragraph and page levels for every popular or useful media will make Gemini or ChatGPT seem like magic.

ryao 2y ago
よつば = yotsuba よっば = yobba As someone who has tried learning Japanese, it took me longer than I am willing to admit that to realize the two were different and things made much more sense after I realized the difference. That said, learning Japanese is an extremely slow process and even if one does learn enough to understand a novel, one’s reading speed will be extremely slow, even if one is lucky enough to remember enough that it is not necessary to use a dictionary every other kanji. Even upon learning Japanese, it is quite tempting to dump the text into a LLM to have it translated.
adibzaini 2y ago
Thank you for your feedback! I will try to improve the OCR and also the problem with understanding context.