how-to-translate-manga

How to translate manga to English, on a single page, is four steps: read the text, including the vertical text, translate it so it fits the bubble, put the new words back into the art, then have a person read the page. A tool can do the middle of that. It does not replace the read at the end.

Do this for a page you drew, or a page you are allowed to edit. The steps are the same either way. The picture at the top is an illustration of an empty page. It is not a translated comic, and this session did not run a copyrighted page through a translator.

This is not a comparison of translator products. A separate article, TranslateImage AI vs Editaimg's image translator, already covers that. The job here is the page.

1. Read the page in the order it was drawn

Japanese manga is drawn to be read from the right. The first panel on a tier is the one on the right. Leave the art facing the way it was drawn. Flipping the page to make it read left to right also flips hands, clothing, and any writing that is part of the drawing.

On one page, mark every piece of text before you translate any of it:

Words inside speech bubbles, including text set in vertical columns.
Small text beside those columns.
Sound effects drawn into the art, outside any bubble.
Signs, labels, and captions.

Vertical text is the step that fails first. A bubble drawn for a tall column of characters is a narrow box. Software that expects a horizontal line will read the column in the wrong order, or it will miss it.

2. Translate for the bubble, not for a dictionary

English is usually set horizontally, even when the original was a vertical column. The same bubble then has less room. Letterers who do this work for publication say the translation has to be short enough to fit. In a 2020 account from the Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators, letterer Sara Linsley describes setting English into bubbles that were drawn for vertical Japanese, and translator Matt Bovia's advice on the same page is to use shorter words and to think about the balloon while translating.

Write the line the way it will be broken across the bubble. A correct sentence that does not fit is not finished.

3. Put the words back

The original ink has to come out, the art under it has to be repaired, and the new line has to sit in the bubble. Sound effects and signs are part of the drawing, so they are redrawn, not pasted on as a caption.

Two sites on Seailife will take an image and return an image, which is this step rather than a plain text dump:

TranslateImage AI describes a manga mode for manga, manhwa, and manhua, aimed at speech bubbles and vertical text, and an editor where you point at a region and have that spot repainted. Its pages, checked 24 October 2026, say uploads are JPG, JPEG, PNG, or WebP up to 10 MB.
Editaimg's image translator describes one image at a time: it detects the visible text, translates into a language you pick, and returns a picture. The same page says you can add a short instruction about tone or formatting, and that the download is a PNG or a JPG. It lists 16 target languages.

Use whichever one you can open. Then read the result. The vendor pages describe what the tools attempt. They are not a guarantee that a vertical column, a sound effect, or a name came out right. This session did not upload a page, so there is no before-and-after here.

A BasicCAT lettering note shows the same geometry problem in software: a tall, narrow Japanese bubble makes an automatic English font too large, and words break, until the box is widened and the line is centered. If the tool's line is sitting at the top of the bubble or splitting words, fix that region before you call the page done. High-end lettering redraws the bubble. For one page, fixing the line is enough if the art underneath is intact.

4. Have a person check the page

Read the page out loud, in reading order.

The first panel is still the one the artist put first.
Names are the same every time they appear.
Sound effects were either translated on purpose or left as part of the drawing. They were not dropped.
No English word is cut off by the edge of a bubble.
A vertical original was not set as one tall English word, broken a letter at a time.
Signs still say something a reader can use. A shop sign that became a garbled line is still wrong even if the bubbles look clean.

If a line is wrong, change that line. TranslateImage's editor is built for pointing at one region. On Editaimg's page, the published advice when a result is off is to use a clearer source, add a more specific instruction, or run it again. Either way, the check is a person who can read both languages, or a person checking against a translation you trust.

Sources

Checked 24 October 2026. No manga page was translated in this session.

Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators, the lettering and translation spotlight, for how English is set into bubbles drawn for vertical text, and for the advice to write short lines
BasicCAT, Lettering Guide for Japanese to English Manga Translation, for the tall-bubble font problem
TranslateImage AI and Editaimg's image translator, for what those two pages say they do with an image