Thousands of manga will be translated with AI

Several large companies, including manga publisher Shogakukan (original founder of Shueisha), will invest in a startup that aims to bring some 50,000 manga translated by artificial intelligence (AI) to foreign markets.

According to a new report from Nikkei, a group consisting of Shogakukan ("Detective Conan," "Sousou no Frieren"), the Japanese government's Japan Industrial Innovation Investment Corporation, and eight other companies will invest 2.92 billion yen (about 19 billion U.S. dollars) in an AI company that aims to translate more than 50,000 manga titles using AI over the next five years. The manga startup, Orange, was founded in 2021 and is made up of manga publishers, AI generators, game developers, and more.

Orange claims that its AI can translate manga in one-tenth the time of fully human processes, describing its method of translating text by AI, followed by a translator's corrections. The startup adds that a fully translated volume could be completed in as little as a few days. Orange works with other manga publishers, and their AI-translated works will arrive in the U.S. this summer via the upcoming "EMAQI" app. The offering will include manga aimed at children and adults.

Naturally, Orange's claims and methods will come under scrutiny. The industry's strong push towards AI, with Crunchyroll stating that it was "focused" on testing AI for anime subtitling, has been met with an equally fierce backlash from fans and, just as importantly, translators. Many translators say they have been fired and rehired under worse conditions to now work with AI, even though AI translations are often poor, leading professionals to do the same work for lower pay.

However, Nikkei highlights the opposite argument. The Japanese anti-piracy group CODA highlights that the amount of damage to the publishing industry caused by piracy is between $2.57 billion and $5.40 billion. One of the main factors contributing to piracy is the lag between releases in Japan and foreign regions in the West. Since many fans justify piracy as a service issue, translations by an AI should reduce this problem, making human-run scanlation sites (and therefore taking longer to translate chapters than an AI) less attractive to them.

Source: Nikkei