Translate Japanese comics to English. Instantly. In Any Language.

Japanese Comics Are More Than Just Manga

When people think of Japanese comics, they think of manga. But Japan produces a huge variety of illustrated text content that falls outside the standard manga format. Doujinshi (self-published works) fill conventions with original stories and parodies. Anthology collections gather short works from dozens of artists into single volumes. Art books include comics-style illustrated sequences with Japanese commentary. Fan magazines mix articles with comic strips. All of this content contains Japanese text that you might want to read in English.

Our Japanese to English comic translator handles all of it. Any image with Japanese text, in any format, gets recognized and translated. You're not limited to standard manga page layouts. Irregular panel arrangements, full-page illustrations with text overlays, mixed text-and-art layouts, and freeform comic strips all work.

Doujinshi Translation Made Simple

Doujinshi are one of the most requested categories for Japanese-to-English translation. These self-published comics span every genre and style, from professional-quality stories to experimental art pieces. Most will never receive official translations because they're produced in small print runs for convention sales.

The translator handles the unique challenges doujinshi present. Print quality varies widely, from crisp digital printing to rough photocopied pages. Lettering ranges from clean digital fonts to barely legible handwriting. Page sizes and layouts follow no standard. Despite all this variation, the OCR engine extracts Japanese text reliably and the translation engine produces readable English output.

Art Books, Anthologies, and Illustrated Guides

Japanese art books often include commentary, interviews, and short comic sequences interspersed with illustrations. Translating just the comic pages while leaving the rest in Japanese breaks the reading experience. Our translator processes every page, whether it's a full comic panel or a text-heavy interview page, giving you complete access to the content.

Manga anthologies collecting works from multiple artists present their own challenge: each artist has a different lettering style. Some use digital fonts, others hand-letter everything, and a few use decorative scripts that look more like art than text. The Japanese to English comic translator adapts to each style within the same volume.

Complete Japanese Script Coverage

Every type of Japanese text you'll encounter in comics gets handled: standard kanji and kana in dialogue, katakana SFX scattered through action scenes, romaji (Latin alphabet) used for English loanwords, and even the occasional Chinese characters used for stylistic effect. Furigana reading guides above kanji are detected and used to improve translation accuracy for unusual terms.

Translation costs 0.1 credits per image, regardless of how much text is on the page. A text-heavy doujinshi page costs the same as a splash page with a single speech bubble. Upload any Japanese comic page to try it, and visit our pricing page for subscription options.