A Japanese publishing startup is using Anthropic’s flagship large language model Claude to help translate manga into English, allowing the company to churn out a new title for a Western audience in just a few days rather than the two to three months it would take a team of humans.
Orange was founded by Shoko Ugaki, a manga superfan who (according to VP of product Rei Kuroda) has some 10,000 titles in his house. The company now wants more people outside Japan to have access to them. “I hope we can do a great job for our readers,” says Kuroda.
But not everyone is happy. The firm has angered a number of manga fans who see the use of AI to translate a celebrated and traditional art form as one more front in the ongoing battle between tech companies and artists. “However well-intentioned this company might be, I find the idea of using AI to translate manga distasteful and insulting,” says Casey Brienza, a sociologist and author of the book Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics.
Manga is a form of Japanese comic that has been around for more than a century. Hit titles are often translated into other languages and find a large global readership, especially in the US. Some, like Battle Angel Alita or One Piece, are turned into anime (animated versions of the comics) or live-action shows and become blockbuster movies and top Netflix picks. The US manga market was worth around $880 million in 2023 but is expected to reach $3.71 billion by 2030, according to some estimates. “It’s a huge growth market right now,” says Kuroda.
Orange wants a part of that international market. Only around 2% of titles published in Japan make it to the US, says Kuroda. As Orange sees it, the problem is that manga takes human translators too long to translate. By building AI tools to automate most of the tasks involved in translation—including extracting Japanese text from a comic’s panels, translating it into English, generating a new font, pasting the English back into the comic, and checking for mistranslations and typos—it can publish a translated mange title in around one-tenth the time it takes human translators and illustrators working by hand, the company says.
Humans still keep a close eye on the process, says Kuroda: “Honestly, AI makes mistakes. It sometimes misunderstands Japanese. It makes mistakes with artwork. We think humans plus AI is what’s important.”
Superheroes, aliens, cats
Manga is a complex art form. Stories are told via a mix of pictures and words, which can be descriptions or characters’ voices or sound effects, sometimes in speech bubbles and sometimes scrawled across the page. Single sentences can be split across multiple panels.
There are also diverse themes and narratives, says Kuroda: “There’s the student romance, mangas about gangs and murders, superheroes, aliens, cats.” Translations must capture the cultural nuance in each story. “This complexity makes localization work highly challenging,” he says.
Orange often starts with nothing more than the scanned image of a page. Its system first identifies which parts of the page show Japanese text, copies it, and erases the text from each panel. These snippets of text are then combined into whole sentences and passed to the translation module, which not only translates the text into English but keeps track of where on the page each individual snippet comes from. Because Japanese and English have a very different word order, the snippets need to be reordered, and the new English text must be placed on the page in different places from where the Japanese equivalent had come from—all without messing up the sequence of images.
“Generally, the images are the most important part of the story,” says Frederik Schodt, an award-winning manga translator who published his first translation in 1977. “Any language cannot contradict the images, so you can’t take many of the liberties that you might in translating a novel. You can’t rearrange paragraphs or change things around much.”
Orange tried several large language models, including its own, developed in house, before picking Claude 3.5. “We’re always evaluating new models,” says Kuroda. “Right now Claude gives us the most natural tone.”
Claude also has an agent framework that lets several sub-models work together on an overall task. Orange uses this framework to juggle the multiple steps in the translation process.
Orange distributes its translations via an app called Emaqi (a pun on “emaki,” the ancient Japanese illustrated scrolls that are considered a precursor to manga). It also wants to be a translator-for-hire for US publishers.
But Orange has not been welcomed by all US fans. When it showed up at Anime NYC, a US anime convention, this summer, the Japanese-to-English translator Jan Mitsuko Cash tweeted: “A company like Orange has no place at the convention hosting the Manga Awards, which celebrates manga and manga professionals in the industry. If you agree, please encourage @animenyc to ban AI companies from exhibiting or hosting panels.”
Brienza takes the same view. “Work in the culture industries, including translation, which ultimately is about translating human intention, not mere words on a page, can be poorly paid and precarious,” she says. “If this is the way the wind is blowing, I can only grieve for those who will go from making little money to none.”
Some have also called Orange out for cutting corners. “The manga uses stylized text to represent the inner thoughts that the [protagonist] can’t quite voice,” another fan tweeted. “But Orange didn’t pay a redrawer or letterer to replicate it properly. They also just skip over some text entirely.”
Everyone at Orange understands that manga translation is a sensitive issue, says Kuroda: “We believe that human creativity is absolutely irreplaceable, which is why all AI-assisted work is rigorously reviewed, refined, and finalized by a team of people.”
Orange also claims that the authors it has translated are on board with its approach. “I’m genuinely happy with how the English version turned out,” says Kenji Yajima, one of the authors Orange has worked with, referring to the company’s translation of his title Neko Oji: Salaryman reincarnated as a kitten! (see images). “As a manga artist, seeing my work shared in other languages is always exciting. It’s a chance to connect with readers I never imagined reaching before.”
Schodt sees the upside too. He notes that the US is flooded with poor-quality, unofficial fan-made translations. “The number of pirated translations is huge,” he says. “It’s like a parallel universe.”
He thinks using AI to streamline translation is inevitable. “It’s the dream of many companies right now,” he says. “But it will take a huge investment.” He believes that really good translation will require large language models trained specifically on manga: “It’s not something that one small company is going to be able to pull off.”
“Whether this will prove economically feasible right now is anyone’s guess,” says Schodt. “There is a lot of advertising hype going on, but the readers will have the final judgment.”