[unwoundmouse]

I've been thinking about this problem for a little bit. I think an app idea that has potential is a sort of 'wikipedia for manga translation'. Essentially you have some automated translator do a first pass, create rough translations. This is served to customers. All the readers, then, have the ability to move around the overlayed speech bubbles and edit the text inside them. For the most part, automated translation seems to capture a lot of high level stuffs, and the large number of community participants can fill in the details/broken translations using context, and additionally do whatever cleaning needs to be done.

[Klaster_1]

Something similar has already been done years ago, see the infamous GTO scanlation (exmaple: https://www.reddit.comhttps://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comment...). Decent manga (and comics in general) translation requires a "redraw" step where original text is completely removed. Some titles keep text strictly in bubbles, but most have text over the artwork to a varying degree, from simple (minutes per page) to highly non-trivial (hours). An image inpainting algorithm that removes text from manga would be really impressive and save a lot of effort.

[kevingadd]

Good automated (or even partially automated) inpainting would probably be a godsend for typesetters, since they can spend a considerable amount of time on a single page if it has lots of text or detailed illustrations. I imagine the publishers that put out multiple print volumes a month would probably pay good money for it, but it might still be too small of a market to build commercial software for...

In the worst case even skilled typesetters can spend an entire day cleaning up and typesetting a particularly nasty page if they have to repaint lines and blank out dozens or hundreds of kanji (it happens)