BallonsTranslator: A Manga Translation Tool with One-Click Machine Translation and Text-Image Editing 105

BallonsTranslator is a comic translation tool developed based on deep learning, specifically designed to help comic fans overcome language barriers when reading Japanese and American comics. It can automatically detect text content in comics and complete translations through intelligent recognition, while accurately preserving the original text's color, outline, and layout effects, greatly improving translation efficiency and eliminating the long waits previously required for translation results. In addition, this tool offers practical features such as image repair and rich text editing, allowing users to freely adjust font styles and layouts, as well as use a one-click machine translation function. It also supports importing and exporting Word documents, making it ideal for handling various webtoon comics, and is compatible with multiple OCR and translation engines.

Features

• One-Click Machine Translation: It can automatically recognize comic text and complete translation. When backfilling the translation, it refers to the original layout, attempting to faithfully restore details such as color, outline, angle, orientation, and alignment. Currently, the layout optimization effect for Japanese-to-Chinese and Japanese-to-English translations of Japanese and American comics is quite good.

• Image Editing: Supports mask editing and repair brush functions, making it convenient for users to erase and repair text areas in comics.

• Text Editing: Uses WYSIWYG rich text editing, which not only allows basic layout formatting adjustments and font style presets, but also supports find-and-replace across the full text, source text, and translation. It also supports importing and exporting Word documents.

• Manual Proofreading: You can also manually modify translation results to make the translation more accurate.

• Multi-language Support: Supports translation from Japanese, English, and many other languages into Chinese or other languages.

How to Use

Installation

First, go to the GitHub page to download the latest version of the code. After extracting it, run scripts/local_gitpull.bat to update the code (this step is optional), then run launch_win.bat to start the program.

Configuration

Click the "gear" button in the lower left corner to enter the settings page. In the text detection section, the detector can be set to ctd. The smaller the detect_size value, the more refined the detection, but the speed will be slower; the larger the det_rearrange_max_batches value, the faster the speed, but it will consume more memory. For device, choose mps, cuda, or cpu based on your computer's configuration. For OCR, you can select manga_ocr. Translators can be chosen from Papago, DeepL Free, etc. If using a large language model like ChatGPT, you need to fill in the API address.

Translation Operation

Place the comic images to be translated in a folder, then select that folder after opening BallonsTranslator. If you only want to translate one page, click the "Translate this page" button at the bottom of the software; for batch processing, click the Run button. The processed results will be saved in the result folder within the original folder.

Advantages

• User-Friendly: It is derived from Manga-image-translator and comes with an integrated package, making setup very simple.

• Convenient Secondary Editing: Although the replacement and repair effects are not as good as Manga-image-translator, secondary editing and modification are more convenient.

• Low VRAM Usage: Even graphics cards with 6G of VRAM can use it.

Application Scenarios

Personal Hobbyist Translation: Comic enthusiasts can use it to translate their favorite comics on their own, gaining a better understanding of the content.

Professional Translation Work Assistance: Comic translation professionals can use its one-click machine translation feature to quickly translate content, then perform manual proofreading and polishing.

Comic Publishers: Publishers can use it to quickly translate comics and assess the market potential of works, thereby deciding whether to license and publish them. It can also serve as an auxiliary tool for editors and proofreaders.

Project Address

https://github.com/dmMaze/BallonsTranslator