Due to the significant time and effort required for handcrafting translations, most manga never leave the domestic Japanese market. Automatic manga translation is a promising potential solution. However, it is a budding and underdeveloped field and presents complexities even greater than those found in standard translation due to the need to effectively incorporate visual elements into the translation process to resolve ambiguities. In this work, we investigate to what extent multimodal large language models (LLMs) can provide effective manga translation, thereby assisting manga authors and publishers in reaching wider audiences. Specifically, we propose a methodology that leverages the vision component of multimodal LLMs to improve translation quality and evaluate the impact of translation unit size, context length, and propose a token efficient approach for manga translation. Moreover, we introduce a new evaluation dataset – the first parallel Japanese-Polish manga translation dataset – as part of a benchmark to be used in future research. Finally, we contribute an open-source software suite, enabling others to benchmark LLMs for manga translation. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results for Japanese-English translation and set a new standard for Japanese-Polish.

This paper focuses on improving the performance of machine translation for manga (Japanese-style comics). In manga machine translation, text consists of a sequence of speech bubbles and each speech bubble is translated individually. However, each speech bubble itself does not contain sufficient information for translation. Therefore, previous work has proposed methods to use contextual information, such as the previous speech bubble, speech bubbles within the same scene, and corresponding scene images. In this research, we propose two new approaches to capture broader contextual information. Our first approach involves scene-based translation that considers the previous scene. The second approach considers broader context information, including details about the work, author, and manga genre. Through our experiments, we confirm that each of our methods improves translation quality, with the combination of both methods achieving the highest quality. Additionally, detailed analysis reveals the effect of zero-anaphora resolution in translation, such as supplying missing subjects not mentioned within a scene, highlighting the usefulness of longer contextual information in manga machine translation.

We tackle the problem of machine translation of manga, Japanese comics. Manga translation involves two important problems in machine translation: context-aware and multimodal translation. Since text and images are mixed up in an unstructured fashion in Manga, obtaining context from the image is essential for manga translation. However, it is still an open problem how to extract context from image and integrate into MT models. In addition, corpus and benchmarks to train and evaluate such model is currently unavailable. In this paper, we make the following four contributions that establishes the foundation of manga translation research. First, we propose multimodal context-aware translation framework. We are the first to incorporate context information obtained from manga image. It enables us to translate texts in speech bubbles that cannot be translated without using context information (e.g., texts in other speech bubbles, gender of speakers, etc.). Second, for training the model, we propose the approach to automatic corpus construction from pairs of original manga and their translations, by which large parallel corpus can be constructed without any manual labeling. Third, we created a new benchmark to evaluate manga translation. Finally, on top of our proposed methods, we devised a first compleheisive system for fully automated manga translation.

Japanese comics (called manga) are traditionally created in monochrome format. In recent years, in addition to monochrome comics, full color comics, a more attractive medium, have appeared. Unfortunately, color comics require manual colorization, which incurs high labor costs. Although automatic colorization methods have been recently proposed, most of them are designed for illustrations, not for comics. Unlike illustrations, since comics are composed of many consecutive images, the painting style must be consistent. To realize consistent colorization, we propose here a semi-automatic colorization method based on generative adversarial networks (GAN); the method learns the painting style of a specific comic from small amount of training data. The proposed method takes a pair of a screen tone image and a flat colored image as input, and outputs a colorized image. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves better performance than the existing alternatives.

Large events with many attendees cause congestion in the traffic network around the venue. To avoid accidents or delays due to this kind of unexpected congestion, it is important to predict the level of congestion in advance of the event. This study aimed to forecast congestion triggered by large events. However, historical congestion information alone is insufficient to forecast congestion at large venues when non-recurrent events are held there. To address this problem, we utilize microblog posts that refer to future events as an indicator of event attendance. We propose a regression model that is trained with microblog posts and historical congestion information to accurately forecast congestion at large venues. Experiments on next 24-hour congestion forecasting using real-world traffic and Twitter data demonstrate that our model reduces the prediction errors over those of the baseline models (autoregressive and long short term memory) by 20% - 50%.

Shonosuke Ishiwatari, Jingtao Yao, Shujie Liu, Mu Li, Ming Zhou, Naoki Yoshinaga, Masaru Kitsuregawa, Weijia Jia. Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2017.

We propose a method that learns a crosslingual projection of word representations from one language into another.Our method utilizes translatable context pairs as bonus terms of the objective function.In the experiments, our method outperformed existing methods in three language pairs, (English, Spanish), (Japanese, Chinese) and (English, Japanese), without using any additional supervisions.