In a major push towards making manga more accessible internationally, several manga publishers along with the Japanese government’s Japan Industrial Innovation Investment Corporation have come together to translate manga titles to English using AI resources. As Nikkei reported, this is going to be accomplished by a start-up named Orange which has been provided an initial funding of 2.92 billion yen (~US$19 million). At least eight of the biggest manga publishers including Shogakukan have come together to contribute to the project.
The Orange team, meanwhile, comprises manga editors, game developers, and so on, besides of course a robust AI team. Right now, the mission is to translate 50,000 manga titles to English besides exporting them to various markets around the world in the next five years. While the US happens to be one of the biggest markets for manga internationally, Spanish-speaking regions and India happen to be among the priority areas that the group would like to focus more on. Orange was founded in 2021 and is considered to have the experience needed to take on the mammoth task.
Orange officials stated they will be using AI technologies that is going to be ten times faster in doing the translation work compared to human-led effort. This way, it would take just a few days to translate a complete manga volume. While AI would be engaged in doing the initial translation work, the same is going to be processed by human translators to rule out possible errors from machine translators. The manga titles are going to be distributed internationally via the app emaqi. The first such translated manga titles will start arriving by this summer itself.
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