[HN Gopher] Show HN: Translate Japanese manga and Korean manhwa ...
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Show HN: Translate Japanese manga and Korean manhwa with Chrome
extension
If you are a manga or manhwa lover, you must understand the feeling
of waiting for your favourite series being translated into English
or sometimes your native language. Now, you can translate them in
real-time with Fakey Chrome extension!
Author : adibzaini
Score : 26 points
Date : 2025-03-09 14:25 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pawakalabs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pawakalabs.com)
| adibzaini wrote:
| Hi, I'm Adib. I hope you like my extension!
| ohm wrote:
| That's awesome! What's your favorite manga and what manga are
| you reading now?
| babuloseo wrote:
| Its over for scanlation groups and those that translate
| lightnovels. How will they ever recover.
|
| Also this is a manga thread now. I will go with Oyasumi Punpun as
| one of the best mangas I have ever read ;)) and I recommend it to
| you all. Dont look up anything about it just read :)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I don't trust AI to translate anything accurately to are from a
| language outside of maybe Spanish and German.
|
| There's way too much nuance in both Korean and Japanese for
| this to reliably work. Chinese, from my limited study is a bit
| closer to English in grammar and structure so that might work
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Tbf a lot of translators are also really bad. Not sure if
| you've heard the story of Jojo and Duwang.
| thirdacc wrote:
| >I don't trust AI to translate anything accurately to are
| from a language outside of maybe Spanish and German.
|
| But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you
| perfect, professional-level translations.
|
| >Chinese, from my limited study is a bit closer to English in
| grammar and structure so that might work
|
| Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English
| than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar
| structure, just like Japanese and Korean.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| > Mandarin is full of nuance, and it's no closer to English
| than Japanese is. It has the Subject-Object-Verb grammar
| structure, just like Japanese and Korean.
|
| This isn't correct from what I've studied in both Japanese
| and Mandarin.
|
| https://lptranslations.com/learn/chinese-vs-
| japanese/#:~:tex...
|
| > For example, Chinese verbs are not conjugated and only
| have one form, whereas Japanese verbs have a wide range of
| conjugations and particles. Plus, Chinese is an SVO
| (Subject+Verb+Object) language just like English, so
| sentences are easier to make and interpret. Vice versa,
| Japanese is an SOV (Subject+Object+Verb) language, meaning
| you do not say: "I eat sushi" but "I sushi eat".
| z2 wrote:
| You're absolutely right -- though, while Mandarin's SVO
| structure _does_ align with English in basic sentences,
| what's interesting is how flexible word order and grammar
| in general can become in practice, thanks to its reliance
| on context and particles rather than rigid syntax. For
| example:
|
| Mandarin often moves the object to the front for
| emphasis, creating an OSV or SOV structure (e.g., Shou Si
| Ni Chi , "Sushi, you eat" or Ni Shou Si Chi Liao Ma "You
| sushi eaten?"). This isn't true SOV grammar but
| highlights how meaning shifts through word order in ways
| English can't replicate without rephrasing.
|
| The nuance in Mandarin often comes from particles that
| take on very different meanings depending on how they are
| used (e.g. Liao , De ) and contextual cues rather than
| conjugation. For instance, Chi "eat" becomes past tense
| with Liao (Chi Liao ), future with Hui (Hui Chi ), or
| continuous with Zai (Zai Chi )--no verb changes needed.
| But if you say Yao Chi Liao , it actually means future
| tense of "will eat soon"!
|
| Meanwhile, Japanese relies heavily on verb conjugations
| (Shi beru-Shi beta) and postpositional particles (ha, wo)
| to mark grammatical roles, in a way making its structure
| more rigid and easier to interpret. Personally I found
| Tae Kim's interpretation of "Japanese isn't SOV, it's
| actually V!" to be useful.
|
| Both languages share subject-drop tendencies (like
| omitting "I" or "you" when contextually clear), and
| compound-word formation in both languages from the use of
| Chinese characters (kanji) adds another layer of
| contextual interpretation.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you
| perfect, professional-level translations.
|
| I often prefer fan level over professional level because
| they are targeting different audience. As far as quality
| goes, there is a range and sometimes I skip something
| because the quality is too low, but I see plenty that does
| a good enough job.
|
| Part of it is that there is no such thing as a perfect
| translation because there isn't an exact equivalent in
| another language. For someone with no knowledge of the
| original culture or language, there is some translations
| that will probably work best, but the more one knows about
| the language and culture, even a small amount picked up
| just from consuming other items, the the more likely a
| different translation works better. For a definite concrete
| example, how should one handle honorifics like chan, san,
| and kun.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _But you trust scanlation groups? Neither will give you
| perfect, professional-level translations._
|
| Just because neither are perfect doesn't mean they are
| equally bad, though.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think this isn't about subtle nuances but blatant errors
| that require full multimodal input to notice. Most
| MTLs(including LLMs) are done by divorcing text from
| content and processing it in CSV-like lists, and there's
| just not enough data in text by itself. This routinely lead
| to outputs doing something completely different from input.
|
| Not in manga space, but Microsoft had been notorious for
| nonchalantly shipping crazy MTL errors for past 3-5 years,
| e.g. "Copilot Child Adoption Kit", "Reply in cost
| estimate", or "Print in scenery". For manga and
| entertainments, more likely modes of errors would be wildly
| fluctuating pronouns, genders, personas, formalities almost
| in styles of Monty Python satire.
|
| These are less likely to manifest with language pairs that
| are closer together like English and German, and less
| likely with human translators who can trivially go through
| pages to read with full context and/or write with
| consistency.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Oyasumi Punpun is amazing but I would definitely posit that is
| a deep and emotional story before recommending it to someone.
| degurechaff wrote:
| LOL, I read manga for laughing, not for depression ...
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Its over for scanlation groups and those that translate
| lightnovels._
|
| I think it might be a tad premature to say it's over for them.
|
| That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, one of the more recent
| lightnovels I've been reading (via "Slime Reader") has an
| extremely noticeable drop in quality when they moved to machine
| translations (and that's with post-translation editing).
|
| However, the speed at which things can be translated is a huge
| positive, and I'm sure translation tech will get better, so
| it's probably just a matter of time.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Isn't scanlation kind of dead already? Afaik, every major manga
| get released in English weekly/monthly, and almost everything
| else is officially translated.
| skeaker wrote:
| Not at all.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Good to know! I guess I had the wrong impression of the
| scene.
|
| I have always had huge respect for both manga and anime
| translation groups.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| if it improves over the dreadful Baki scanlations.... shudder
| educasean wrote:
| How I used to dream of a technology that would one day enable
| this. Kudos on your release!
| ge96 wrote:
| Some copy feedback
|
| "How does Fakey work?"
|
| "In your dreams" (pricing)
|
| It's cool it replaces the text in the page, makes sense, wonder
| if it's an overlay or literally modifies the image on the page
|
| Maybe it uses contour finding for the speech bubbles
|
| The other Chiyo
| sharps_xp wrote:
| solo leveling no contest
| ge96 wrote:
| the anime's been great, not a manga reader myself
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| It's a korean web toon so the art is fantastic. The art gets
| no justice in the Anime.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Come on, the anime has insane art and animation. They are
| kicking the ball out of the park, especially with S2.
| vaidhy wrote:
| Is there one for Chinese light novels too? There are too many
| that are partly translated and I am desparate to get a different
| translation than one from MTNL.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| I recently used a different extension to translate some chapters
| for a pretty niche manga that'd been dropped by its scanlation
| team, and the results were definitely readable, but one area
| where it seemed to struggle a bit was with third-person pronouns
| (to some confusing results).
|
| IIRC Japanese usually defaults to a generic pronoun that means
| "that person" rather than more specific pronouns for "he" or
| "she," so there were some times where I think the AI had to guess
| on whether "he" or "she" was the appropriate equivalent and just
| guessed wrong. In at least one instance it might've also been
| that a character was intentionally using feminine address to
| refer to an outwardly gay man, which could've been an interesting
| nuance if translated more clearly, but as things were it just
| left me confused.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| Does the LLM get the whole page or one speech bubble at a time?
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(page generated 2025-03-12 23:01 UTC)