In order to translate manga comics into English five times faster and ninety percent less expensively than they are now, a Japanese startup announced on Tuesday that it plans to use artificial intelligence.
Manga series like “One Piece” and “Dragon Ball” are enormous success stories in Japan; a firm called Orange Inc. estimates that the market would be valued $42.2 billion by 2030.
However, it stated that just 2% of the 700,000 manga volumes produced in Japan each year are published in English, “partly due to the difficult and lengthy translation process and the limited number of translators”.
Orange, however, hopes to use its technology to print 500 English-language mangas a month—five times the industry’s current output—and 50,000 volumes in five years. Later on, other languages will be added.
According to Orange’s vice-president of marketing Tatsuhiro Sato, “translating Japanese used in manga, which uses very short sentences of conversational language often full of slang, is extremely difficult.” This is in contrast to translating a book.
“It is also difficult to figure out if the particular quote was actually said at a scene, or the line was a murmur inside one’s heart describing a mental landscape,” Sato stated to repoters.
Other difficulties include the original text’s frequent vertical writing style and the need to discover synonyms for the numerous terms used in Japanese to represent noises.
The company declared that it had received money of 2.92 billion yen ($19 million) from nine venture capital companies, including the government-backed JIC Venture Growth Investments, and prominent publisher Shogakukan.
It claimed that its product will aid in the fight against industry piracy, which the Content Overseas Distribution Association estimates to be worth $5.5 billion a year.
