Read raw Japanese manga in English the day each chapter lands — no waiting two weeks for the official simulpub, no broken Google Translate screenshots. MangaLens overlays AI-translated English directly onto the page, inside the original speech bubbles, with the vertical-text OCR and honorific handling that generic translators get wrong. Works on MangaPlus, Comic Days, MangaDex raws, Rawkuma, and any site that displays Japanese manga images.
English readers don't pick MangaLens because they're tired of all Japanese manga — they pick it because the official English release lags the Japanese release, or the series was never licensed, or the scanlation group dropped it. These are the three patterns we see the most.
One Piece, My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, Kingdom — even the simulcast titles often hit Japan a day or two before MangaPlus pushes the English version, and many tankobon-only series have months of buffer in Japanese first. MangaLens reads the raw the moment it drops.
Plenty of award-winning series — historical, slice-of-life, food manga, niche sports titles — simply never get an English license. Reading the original tankobon in Japanese with MangaLens is often the only way to finish the story.
A group translates chapters 1–40, then disappears. The Japanese release is at chapter 120. MangaLens lets you keep reading without waiting for another group to pick the project up — which often never happens.
One-click install from the Chrome Web Store. Works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera, and Vivaldi.
Go to MangaPlus, Comic Days, MangaDex, Rawkuma, or wherever you read raws. Open the Japanese chapter in the normal reader.
Hit the MangaLens icon, choose English. Every bubble is OCR'd as vertical Japanese, translated, and rendered inside the original bubble. Scroll keeps working.
Japanese-to-English is one of the most heavily-trained translation pairs in modern AI, and MangaLens uses state-of-the-art models on top of OCR specifically tuned for manga typesetting — vertical right-to-left reading order, kanji-with-furigana, and stylized fonts. For 90% of dialogue — shonen action, slice-of-life, romance, sports manga, isekai — the English output reads close to a professional fan translation. For dense literary seinen (Vagabond, 20th Century Boys), historical period works, or wordplay-heavy comedy, MangaLens captures meaning accurately but may smooth out poetic phrasing. Treat it as a strong first pass and an outright lifesaver for raws.
Yes. Manga is overwhelmingly typeset top-to-bottom, right-to-left, and MangaLens's OCR is tuned specifically for vertical Japanese. The model reads each bubble in correct kanji order, then renders the English translation horizontally inside the original speech-bubble shape.
Furigana ruby text above kanji is detected and used as a reading hint, not duplicated in the translation. Sound effects (onomatopoeia like ドキドキ or ゴゴゴ) are translated to their closest English equivalent (badump-badump, rumble) when the SFX is inside or adjacent to a bubble — freely-drawn SFX painted into the artwork is preserved as-is.
Yes. The model handles standard joyo kanji plus most rare kanji used in historical, samurai, and seinen titles. For extremely dense literary text — Vagabond-tier prose — the translation captures meaning accurately but may smooth out poetic phrasing. Treat the output as a strong first pass for dense series.
By default, honorifics are preserved. Calling someone Tanaka-san stays as Tanaka-san rather than being flattened to Mr. Tanaka. This matches modern English fan-translation convention and preserves the relational nuance the original Japanese is carrying.
Yes — that is the most common use case. Open the raw chapter on MangaPlus, Comic Days, MangaDex, or any aggregator, click the MangaLens icon, and the page translates in place. Most readers use this to read Weekly Shonen Jump titles the moment the Japanese chapter drops, rather than waiting two weeks for the official English release.
200 free translations to try it on real raws. Then $4.99/mo or $49.99/yr (save 17%). Cancel anytime, 14-day refund.
⚡ Add to Chrome — 200 Free Translations