What is BallonTranslator?

Manually translating comics, manga, or webtoons is a detailed, multi-step process that demands significant time and effort. BallonTranslator is a sophisticated, deep-learning-powered tool designed for fan translators and hobbyists who want to streamline this entire workflow. It automates the most tedious tasks—from text detection to typesetting—allowing you to focus on producing high-quality, accurate translations with remarkable efficiency.

Key Features

⚙️ Automated End-to-End Workflow Leveraging a powerful deep learning pipeline, BallonTranslator automates the entire translation sequence. It automatically detects text boxes, performs optical character recognition (OCR), cleans the original text from the image (inpainting), translates the content, and intelligently typesets the new text based on the original's formatting. This turns hours of manual work into a process you can launch with a single click.
🎨 Comprehensive Editing and Inpainting Control Automation doesn't mean sacrificing quality. You have full control to refine the results. Switch to Image Editing mode to manually adjust text masks or use the powerful inpainting tools to flawlessly remove artifacts from complex backgrounds. The result is a clean canvas for your translation.
✏️ Rich Text Formatting and Management Perfect your final output with an interactive text editor. You can apply rich text formatting (bold, italics, underline), create text style presets, and even search and replace text across an entire project. For easier collaboration or archiving, you can export your translated text to a standard Word document.
🔌 Flexible, Modular Engine Tailor the tool to your specific needs by choosing from a variety of integrated modules. BallonTranslator supports multiple engines for text detection (e.g., comic-text-detector, YSGDetector), OCR (manga_ocr, PaddleOCR), and translation services. This flexibility allows you to select the best-performing components for your source language and content type.

How BallonTranslator Solves Your Problems

For the Dedicated Fan Translator (Scanlator): Imagine you have an entire chapter of a new manga to translate. Instead of painstakingly opening each page in Photoshop to manually erase text and re-type translations, you simply point BallonTranslator to the image folder. After the automated run, you can efficiently review each page, making minor edits to the translated text rather than building everything from scratch. This dramatically accelerates your release schedule.
For the Perfectionist Editor: You've run an automated translation, but an onomatopoeia was poorly inpainted on a complex background, and a line of dialogue feels unnatural. With BallonTranslator, you can instantly activate the inpainting tool to correct the background. Then, you can select the specific text block, rephrase the translation, adjust its font size, and add a text shadow for better readability—all within the same interface.

Unique Advantages

Automation with Precision Control: BallonTranslator strikes the perfect balance between speed and quality. It automates the repetitive 90% of the work while providing you with the granular tools needed to control and perfect the final 10%, ensuring a professional-grade result.
Hardware-Accelerated Performance: The tool is optimized to use your computer's full potential. If you have an NVIDIA (CUDA) or Apple Silicon (M1/M2) device, BallonTranslator leverages hardware acceleration to significantly speed up processing-intensive tasks like inpainting and text recognition.

Conclusion

BallonTranslator is more than just a utility; it's a complete workbench for comic and manga translation. By combining intelligent automation with robust editing features, it provides a smarter, faster way to bring stories to new audiences.

More information on BallonTranslator

Launched

Pricing Model

Free

Starting Price

Global Rank

Month Visit

<5k

Tech used

BallonTranslator was manually vetted by our editorial team and was first featured on 2025-07-18.