comic-translate

Why we included this project

Translating comics properly means more than swapping words: you have to locate speech bubbles, erase the original lettering without damaging the art, run OCR across several scripts, and fit translated text back into each panel. Comic Translate automates that whole chain in a desktop app and a Chromium browser extension, so you can process a local file or read a webtoon in the browser and get the translated page back. Bubble detection uses a dedicated RT-DETR model, OCR and inpainting handle the cleanup, and the actual translation is done by a large language model such as GPT-4 instead of a classic machine translator. That choice pays off for distant language pairs like Korean and English, where conventional tools often produce unusable output. If you work with manga, manhwa, or Western comics in EPUB, PDF, CBZ, or plain images, it is a practical all-in-one option, and a manual mode lets you fix the cases automatic detection gets wrong.