Translate scanned pages. Instantly. In Any Language.

From Physical Page to Translated Digital Copy

You've got a stack of manga volumes sitting on your shelf. Maybe you picked them up at a secondhand bookstore overseas, or a friend brought them back from a trip. The art is gorgeous, but you can't read a word. A scan translator changes that. Photograph the page with your phone, upload the image, and get a readable translation in seconds.

Novel Translator's scan translation handles the messy reality of scanned pages. Phone cameras produce uneven lighting. Flatbed scanners leave shadows near the spine. Old pages have yellowed paper and faded ink. None of that matters. Our AI processes the image, identifies text regions in speech bubbles, narration boxes, and sound effects, then delivers accurate translations in 22+ languages.

How Scan Translation Actually Works

Scanned pages present unique challenges that regular image translators struggle with. The text isn't clean digital type. It's printed ink on paper, captured through a lens or scanner glass. Characters might be slightly blurred, skewed at an angle, or partially obscured by page curvature near the binding.

Our scan translator uses multi-stage processing. First, the image gets cleaned up and enhanced. Contrast is adjusted, skew is corrected, and noise is reduced. Then text detection identifies every region containing characters, from tiny sound effects tucked into action scenes to large title text on chapter pages. Finally, each detected region gets translated with full context awareness, so dialogue reads naturally and sound effects make sense.

The result? Clean translations that respect the original page layout. You get back an image where the translated text sits right where the original text was. Try it yourself at our image translation tool and see the difference quality scan processing makes.

Works With Every Type of Scan

Phone photos taken under fluorescent lighting. High-resolution flatbed scans at 600 DPI. Quick snapshots grabbed in a bookstore (we won't judge). Screenshots from digital reading apps. Our scan translator handles them all.

For manga specifically, the system understands Japanese vertical text, right-to-left reading order, and the particular way speech bubbles are arranged on the page. It handles furigana (the small reading guides above complex characters) without confusing them with the main text. Korean manhwa scans get the same treatment, with proper handling of mixed horizontal and vertical text layouts.

Got a whole volume to translate? Batch processing lets you upload multiple scanned pages and translate them all at once. At just 0.1 credits per image, translating an entire volume of scanned manga costs less than a cup of coffee. Check our pricing page for credit packages.

From Collector's Shelf to Reading List

Physical manga and comic collections are treasures. Limited editions, out-of-print volumes, regional exclusives that never got official translations. A scan translator unlocks all of it. You're not limited to what publishers decide to localize. If you can scan it, you can read it.

The workflow is simple. Scan or photograph your pages. Upload to Novel Translator. Download translated images. You can even compile them into a digital reading format afterward. Your physical collection becomes a bilingual library without any damage to the originals.