Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a tool that is being increasingly used in different areas such as translation, especially in products such as manga and anime, where translators are in charge of adapting these stories to different languages in order to bring them to a wider audience. As it is a job that takes many hours, companies are increasingly resorting to the use of AI to speed up this process. This has generated a lot of controversy about whether or not it is right to use these systems in professional jobs, instead of employing human capital, trained for these tasks.
Renowned manga companies are increasingly investing in the use of AI for manga translation
According to the Nikkei website, it reports that large manga companies are investing more and more capital in the use of AI tools to translate their stories into different languages, among them some very popular ones such as One Piece and Spy x Family. Companies such as Kadokawa, Shogakukan, Shueisha and Square Enix Holdings have invested in something called “Mantra”, which uses AI to translate manga. The way it works is that the program analyzes the text through image recognition, then translates it and at the end, a human translator checks the work done and, if necessary, makes corrections.
This type of system reduces the time taken to complete translations compared to traditional methods, i.e., having a person who is dedicated to the translation completely do all the work. After observing the improvements that using these tools brings, companies want to invest more money so that the accuracy and quality of translations is even better, in addition to being able to hire a larger number of staff. The goal that companies like Shueisha seek to achieve by employing these tools is to increase the popularity of manga distribution around the world.
Japanese companies such as CyberAgent, which specializes in advertising, is already working on its own translation AI to be launched probably this year and it would not be strange to think that in the future other companies in different fields will do the same, seeking to accelerate the processes of their translations to optimize resources within their companies, thus achieving better results. Specifically talking about manga and anime, reducing the costs and completion times of translations would probably allow the final products to reach different parts of the world faster.
The above, especially considering that the popularity of anime and manga worldwide has been increasing and more and more people enjoy these products and seek to watch or read them by any means, so reducing the waiting times of the public could represent a great advantage for companies because the frequency of consumption of these would also be higher. However, although this represents many advantages for companies, it continues to be a very controversial topic, since not everyone thinks that the use of AI is appropriate and that, in the long run, this will affect human translators who will be replaced entirely by these tools.
However, people who know about these issues have analyzed the controversy and comment that this would not be entirely possible, since, although great results are achieved using AI, the supervision of a human is always necessary because these types of programs do not have the same sensitivity as a person to adapt certain expressions or words in a way that readers connect with it. What do you think about this issue of the use of AI for the translation of manga?
