How to translate a comic or manga page on your phone

The short answer

Modern phones can recognise text inside images, on the device, and then translate it. In TritonPanels there are two ways to use that:

• Select text picks up the words on the page so you can copy, share or Translate one bubble or a whole page. Good for a line you want to understand or look up.
• Translate pages (Experimental) draws a translation over each speech bubble as you turn the pages. Good for reading straight through a comic in a language you do not know.

Both work on comics stored on your device, run without uploading your pages, and are machine reading followed by machine translation. They are genuinely useful and not perfect, and the last section says where they go wrong.

Select the text in a speech bubble

1. Open the comic and go to the page you want.
2. Tap the page to show the controls, open the reader menu and choose Select text. The app shows “Finding text…” while it reads the page.
3. On Android, tap a word to select it. On iPhone and iPad, touch and hold text to select it. Drag the handles to take in the whole bubble.
4. Choose Copy, Share or Translate. Copy page text takes everything on the page at once, and Highlight text shows every line the app found.

The app picks the alphabet automatically. If a page mixes scripts or comes out as nonsense, tap the language chip and set Recognition language to the right one. On a two-page spread you choose the left or right page.

The comic has to be on the device; for a comic still on a server or in cloud storage, download it first.

The same menu has Lift subject, which cuts a character or object out of the page so you can copy or share it as an image. It needs iOS 17 or later, or an Android device with Google Play services.

Translate a selection

Translate opens a Translation panel showing the original and the translation, with the detected language. You can change the From and To languages, choose Copy translation, or Open in another app to hand the text to a dictionary or a translator you prefer.

On Android the translation runs on Google’s on-device engine, which needs each language downloaded once. The app asks first, and each language is about 30 MB. On iPhone and iPad, Apple manages its own language downloads.

Translate whole pages as you read

Translate pages is marked Experimental in the reader menu, and that label is honest. Turn it on and the app explains what it does — text on each page is recognised and translated on this device, then drawn over the speech bubbles — and that it may be wrong or misplaced and uses more battery. Choose Turn on.

A chip at the top reads, for example, “Translated · Experimental · English”. Tap it to flip between the translation and the original art. It works in Single Page, Double Page and Continuous Scroll, but not in Panel by Panel, and it switches itself off when you leave the comic, so it never surprises you next time.

On iPhone and iPad, Translate pages needs iOS 18 or later. On Android it uses the same downloadable language packs as above.

Which languages and scripts work

Text recognition covers the Latin alphabet (English, French, Spanish, German and many more), Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Devanagari. On Android, some of those script models come from Google Play services and download the first time you need them; the app asks before it does.

Translation goes into the language set under Translate into in Settings > Translation, which starts as “Same as app”. If your device cannot translate into a language, the app says so rather than guessing.

What stays on your phone

Recognition and translation both happen on the device. Your pages are not uploaded, and once a language is downloaded it works offline. The only network traffic is the one-off language downloads, from Google on Android and from Apple on iPhone and iPad.

On Android, Settings > Translation has a Download on Wi-Fi only switch, so a 30 MB pack never comes out of your mobile data, and a Downloaded languages list where you can delete packs you no longer need.

Honest limits

Comic lettering is about the hardest text there is for a machine to read, and it is worth knowing why results vary:

• Stylised lettering. Hand lettering, all-caps comic fonts, bold and italic emphasis and tightly packed bubbles are read less reliably than printed body text.
• Vertical text. Japanese and Chinese bubbles are often lettered top to bottom. Expect more mistakes than with horizontal lines.
• Sound effects. Big hand-drawn sound effects are part of the art and are often missed or misread.
• Low-quality scans. Blur, JPEG artefacts and small text all cost accuracy. A sharper scan helps more than anything; see making scanned comics look better.
• Machine translation. Even with perfect recognition, translation loses jokes, wordplay, tone and context from earlier pages.

Three habits improve results noticeably: set the Recognition language by hand when a page mixes scripts, select one bubble at a time rather than the whole page, and zoom out to the full page before selecting so nothing is cut off at the edge of the screen.

Use it to follow a story or check a line, not as a substitute for a proper translation. If a passage matters, copy the text and check it in a dictionary.

The guides that sit next to this one are Read manga on iPhone, iPad and Android and Read comics offline.

Frequently asked questions

Can I translate manga on my phone without uploading the pages?

Yes. TritonPanels recognises and translates the text on the device. The only downloads are the language packs themselves, from Google on Android or Apple on iPhone and iPad.

Does Translate pages work on iPhone?

Yes, on iPhone and iPad with iOS 18 or later. Select text, with Copy and Share, works on earlier supported versions too.

Why is the translation wrong or in the wrong place?

Comic lettering, vertical text and sound effects are hard to recognise, and machine translation misses context. Try setting the Recognition language by hand, use a sharper scan, or tap the chip to see the original.

How much space do the translation languages take?

On Android, about 30 MB per language. You can download on Wi-Fi only and delete languages from Settings > Translation. On iPhone and iPad, Apple manages the downloads.

Your own files: TritonPanels reads comics you already have. It does not sell, host or supply comics, and it cannot open copy-protected (DRM) purchases that are locked to another store’s app. Komga, Kavita, Calibre, Dropbox and the other names on this page belong to their owners, who do not endorse TritonPanels.