[chocolatkey]

You have much competition in this space with for example https://ichigoreader.com https://ismanga.com and many more (just search the chrome extension store for examples). What is your plan to stand out and remain competitive?

On a side note, if anyone’s been watching the fan translation community, it’s clear this is the end game.

[chucky_z]

I don't actually think it's 'the end game.'

A vast majority of AI translations are usually enough to get the gist of the story but tend to miss a lot of really important with-context story clues. What I've found is that the best case is that you can get a 'speed translation' with AI, and then have a translator come in behind and clean it up. Much like using AI to generate the base of an image and then painting over top of it to fix any artistic choices it's made that the artist doesn't agree with.

[chocolatkey]

I agree that AI translations are not close to the standards many people would expect, but there is a significant, growing population of readers (many with EN as a second language) that are fine with reading MTL using extensions such as this or fan-translated MTL with human assistance, and it is what many new fan translators are opting for as old groups retire. The “speed translators” using MTL also demotivate the slower, better translators, as many people will no longer be as interested in their release. I don’t think human translation will cease for a long time, but in the meantime, MTL as a percentage of new fan translations will continue to grow

[Karrot_Kream]

The quality vs speed translating war has been ongoing forever now. Before I retired (a long time ago now) I had transitioned to quality groups because the speed oriented groups were producing such bad translations. MTL is just accelerating this.

[VincentEvans]

To provide a counterpoint to your hypothesis that “people are fine with easily accessible but subpar results” I often switch from dubbed anime english voiceover to original japanese that I don’t understand and prefer reading subtitles because they convey the meaning and humor much better than the americanized voiceover, and the voice actors are better.

I hope that AI generated simulacra will eventually take its rightful place next to microwave dinners in consumption hall of fame once the novelty wears off.

[gamacodre]

> they convey the meaning and humor much better than the americanized voiceover

I'm glad this isn't just me. I occasionally watch anime and the English dubs are seemingly universally terrible compared to the originals. Subtitles are annoying but nothing like listening to someone mumble their way though a script.

[BizarroLand]

I've read a few that were mangled horribly, people who didn't read other versions so they lost context or made really bad choices in the translation.

It will be a while before not only can the languages be translated but also the intent communicated in context.

[Karrot_Kream]

It's been the end game of fan translation forever. I used to be a manga, LN, and anime scanslator/fansubber in another life.

For popular manga the "meta" today is roughly:

1. Wait for the chapter to be released in China or Taiwan where copyright isn't as broadly enforced.

2. Upload the Chinese raws.

(Steps 1-2 usually happen in a different ecosystem than translation.)

3. Have a Chinese/English bilingual person read the manga and turn it into translated text. These folks are usually pre-teens or teenagers. If this is a popular series, they're under intense speed pressure (the group that drops first wins all the imaginary internet points, or basically all the page views and torrent peers.) The quality of these translations are usually anywhere between average to bad. The kids read barely enough to understand what's going on (given the intense time pressure) and that they're already starting from a translated source (JP -> ZH.)

4. Have your typesetter clean the manga and prepare it for English. This is generally done by also a pre-teen. If they're under time pressure they'll do the bare minimum here to get it out quickly.

5. If you have enough staff and the series is popular, an editor will then edit the text to make sure it makes sense and perhaps rewrite bits to make it reflow into the text bubbles. If you don't, they're often the same person as the TL or the typesetter/cleaner.

6. Upload onto the sites/drop the torrents.

If you can read Japanese you'll realize that a lot of these translations are speed oriented and the quality is quite bad. Sometimes quality-oriented groups will go ahead and revise an already released manga but more often than not once some scanslations are out, others will consider the series "translated" and bad fan scanslations will live on.

When I was active the steps were different; they've changed as they've responded to time pressures. It's already a huge race to the bottom. Most of the big series are getting translated by pre-teens and teens. Some more niche series are being tackled by college students. Doing AI assisted translation is just the next step in an ongoing war to speed up translations.

[prussia]

The manga scanlation world is pretty big, but that's not been my experience and understanding at all.

1. For truly popular mangas, no serious group is going to wait for a chapter to be released in China or Taiwan[0]. Someone that lives in Japan will go out and buy it. Or wait a few days for the it to posted online for sale by the publisher (though sometimes most recent chapter will be free for a few days). It's all illegal so why would it matter if the raws were obtained in China/Taiwan vs. Japan/online anyways?

3-5. For many of the popular series, more "groups" than you would expect are really just one person. And perhaps irregularly a cleaner and/or a typesetter (eg KireiCake[1]). Some more "professional"/commercial groups have much larger teams, and even paid translators, but they tend to do porn (especially erotic BL), because that's where the money is at. I've never heard of pre-teens being part of these groups, but I guess no one would really advertise that they are a pre-teen. Shitty translations (or shitty MTLs) discouraging others is a real problem, especially for more niche series.

[0] Unless the Chinese language release is at the same time of the Japanese one? At least for moderately popular manga, I know the English release is usually months (or more commonly, years) behind. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/1e1bkw9/a_statement_...

[Karrot_Kream]

Yeah the manga scanslation world is really big so I have no doubt there are differences in each of the points, except:

> I've never heard of pre-teens being part of these groups, but I guess no one would really advertise that they are a pre-teen

I was a pre-teen when I started scanslating. I did this for ages and did all the roles that were available back then. I started editing/managing and head TLing multiple projects as a teen. I "retired" in college. I don't want to dox myself too much but the pipeline from scanslater to low-pay intro commercial translation work was very common back when I did it, since it's easy to hit N2 if you were TLing from Japanese and many of the better TLs were N1 or better. While this isn't the case for me, many of the TLs were heritage speakers. From the Discords I'm in these days I'd say the age distribution remains very similar, with a mean around 16. I mean it makes sense, who wants to do this much work with no pay?

[novok]

A halfway tool that would let you take the text and auto-typeset it in would probably be a big thing. All you would need is the equivalent of a subtitles file at that point. The tool will identify regions to change and how to change them, the original text and the machine translation text. Then, all you would need is somebody who can do translations properly afterward to give a better translation, and with less friction, it will happen a lot more. And you could have a user rating of which translation is better.

I could also imagine a tool that would take a page and describe per panel. Then, the translation files with LLMs could have a better idea of the context and probably make a better translation versus a speech bubble by speech bubble type translation since they would only interact with the intermediate 'subtitles' file. It would also be a good accessibility thing for blind people to read a comic.

[allenu]

Do you know if there's a camera-based app that translates on the fly? These all seem to use uploaded images, but I'd love to be able to flip through an actual physical book and translate via an app.

[spacebruce]

The current version of Google Translate is close to managing this, it's reasonably good at picking out separate text bubbles, even in handwritten script, but you might have to play with camera positioning and lighting.

it's best when faced with long stretches of dialogue, the translation does start to fail with short snappy "action manga" japanese with short context-less sentences and exclamations.