Mantraa company dedicated to the research and development of manga translation technology using artificial intelligence (AI), obtained significant financing of approximately 7.8 million yen. Investors include industry heavyweights such as Shueisha, Shogakukan, KADOKAWA, Square Enix Holdings and MPower Partners Fund LP, as well as Tetsuryokukai founder Tsuyoshi Hamagaki.

Mantra EngineMantra's cloud translation tool specializes in vertically scrolling manga and comics. This platform allows you to perform all manga translation tasks directly in the browser, using AI to make the process more efficient and cut the work time in half. Currently, Mantra Engine is used by national and international publishers and translation companies, translating around 10 thousand pages per month, the equivalent of around 500 manga volumes.

The Mantra Engine has proven its ability to improve efficiency in manga translation in multiple languages, with notable projects such as:

• Shogakukan: 'Kengan Omega', 'Kengan Ashura' (English)
• Shueisha: 'One Piece', 'Spy x Family' (Vietnamese), 'Bye Bye Bye', 'Basashi ga Tabetai (I'm So Hungry I Could Eat Basashi)' (English)
• Bushiroad Works: 'Mahoutsukai no Yome (The Ancient Magician's Bride)', 'Ghost and Witch' (English)

Manga translation presents several challenges due to the irregular arrangement of texts and images, use of unique colloquial language and complex context of the stories. To overcome these challenges, Mantra integrated image recognition and machine translation technologies to achieve high accuracy in manga translation. These advances have been recognized at international AI conferences such as AAAI and by associations such as the Asia-Pacific Machine Translation Association, which awarded them the AAMT Nagao Award.

From here the following benefits of this new technology were listed:

• Accurate translation based on context: Combining image recognition technologies and large-scale language models allows AI to consider information about characters and plot during translation.
• Consistency in translation: By considering longer contexts than traditional machine translations, consistency in the style and tone of characters is achieved throughout the work.
• Multilingual support: Mantra Engine currently supports Japanese, English, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Portuguese, with plans to further expand the available languages.

The use of AI in manga translation significant implications for human translators. On the one hand, AI can reduce workload, allowing translators to focus on more complex and creative tasks, such as cultural localization and dialogue adaptation. On the other hand, there is the risk of job displacement for translators who do not adapt to new technologies, although opportunities also open up for those who master the use of these advanced tools.

For consumers, incorporating AI into manga translation can result in Faster, multilingual accessibility. This means that manga fans around the world will be able to enjoy their favorite series almost simultaneously with their release in Japan, eliminating long waits and inevitably affecting piracy.

In short, AI translation technology, like that developed by Mantra, is transforming the manga industry, offering significant benefits to both translators and consumers. The key will be how industry professionals adapt to this new tool and how the transition to closer collaboration between humans and machines in the translation field is managed.

Source: Anime Recorder