A Japanese startup will translate manga into English with AI

A Japanese startup has said that it is focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) to leverage for translating manga comics into English with 90% less price and five times faster.

A Japanese startup sees huge potential in the market

The startup said that Japan produces 700,000 manga editions every year, and only 2% of these volumes are released in English because of the limited number of translators and the strenuous and long-drawn translation process.

The startup called Orange has estimated that the manga market will be $42.2 billion by 2030, as recent manga series like “One Piece” and “Dragon Ball” can be considered outstanding business successes for Japan.

Orange now aims to produce 500 translated English-language manga every month with its AI technology, which will be 500 percent of the entire industry’s current capacity. These will be 50,000 volumes in the next five years, while the startup says that it will add other languages later, according to AFP.

Translating manga is a challenging task

In a statement, Vice President of Marketing at Orange, Tatsuhiro Sato, said,

“Compared to the translation of a book, translating Japanese used in manga, which uses very short sentences of conversational language often full of slang, is extremely difficult.”

Source: Jijipress.

He also explained that usually, it is very difficult to figure out if a particular sentence was actually said as a dialogue by a character at a scene or if the expression was a silent murmuring in the heart explaining one’s mind’s scenery.

The problem is that the original text in the manga is at times written vertically, and finding the equivalent sound-imitative words for those Japanese words is also a challenge in itself.

The startup has said that it has acquired $19 million (¥2.92 billion yen) in funding injection from the government-backed JIC Venture Growth Investments and nine other venture capital groups, along with major publishers like Shogakukan.

The startup said that its tool will also help the industry to fight piracy, which is a big challenge, and is estimated to be somewhere around $5.5 billion on a yearly basis according to the Content Overseas Distribution Association.