Publish at March 08 2022 Updated March 11 2022
Do you love manga, those Japanese comic books, or even American comics, but are frustrated by not being able to read the latest volumes released before they are translated into your language, often more than a year later? No problem, artificial intelligence comes to your rescue with an innovation that will save you precious time. Its name? Geo Comix. Enter the matrix and meet this machine-translating AI...
According to Elon Musk (businessman and entrepreneur - Spacex, Tesla...), "artificial intelligence is potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons" and using it would be like "summoning the demon"... very surprising words from an engineer yet at the cutting edge of technology! It's true that AI has always been talked about, both for good and for bad. But this is not the debate of the day. Today, we are going to evoke a positive point that artificial intelligence offers through the facilities it can bring us, especially in languages and translation.
In 2010, in the west of France, appeared Actialuna, a company specialized in the development of innovative software for the book, especially in publishing and digital bookstore. Gradually this company specializes in visual narration and develops, in close collaboration with the University of La Rochelle, an artificial intelligence capable of translating illustrations and typographic elements. Geo Comix was born.
On its official website (strangely only in English even though it is a French company...), the Geo Comix project describes itself as follows: "Translate comics faster than ever, this is not an automatic translation tool, but a tool that will revolutionize the process of translating comics, comic books, manga and other graphic novels into any language."
The AI contained in Geo Comix detects and analyzes every element present in a comic book panel, namely the boxes, characters and speech bubbles or texts. The latter can be handwritten, typed, inside or outside the bubbles. Each element is therefore located, then analyzed.
Once this "scan" is done, the AI transcribes all the texts of the board. Then begins the work of the translator, because yes, a human translator, in flesh and blood, still remains essential in the publishing world!
That said, the fact that the texts have already been "sorted" saves more than 30% of time and allows you to focus on the content and quality of the translation, and this, thanks to the automatic zooming previously performed by the AI. It must be said that the AI also helps a lot by "suggesting" a translation beforehand, which makes the translator's and then the proofreader's work easier. Finally, the editor takes over and finalizes the automatic positioning in the software of the translation-revision work done.
With comics, comic books and manga exploding in recent years (up 15% between 2020 and 2021 for comics and over 50% in the first half of 2021 alone for manga), the return to reading seems to bode well. Even if we're "only" talking about 30% time savings, this is valuable in the work of translators, letterers and editors of the 7th art.
In terms of user-friendliness and simplicity, Geo Comix also stands out by offering to use a dedicated, online platform that allows translation projects and teams to be grouped together and to save, always online, in real time, their work. It is then easy to work collaboratively, interacting and commenting on each translation submitted, without forgetting any indications to the letter writer. Again, no more wasting time sending heavy illustrated emails like PDFs.
The long-term project of Geo Comix is to improve the marketing of books through optimal search engine optimization.
Despite its very recent commercialization (less than six months), Geo Comix has already signed many agreements with important publishing houses in France, Italy, Denmark and Spain, including the translation of the successful manga "Versailles no Bara" (published in 1978, literally La Rose de Versailles), better known to the French-speaking public under the name Lady Oscar.
Artificial intelligence is once again showing the technical prowess it can deliver and that, in all fields. That of books is no exception, but in this case, it is for the greatest happiness of readers, who, thanks to this innovation, will be able to hope to read their favorite mangas and other comics more quickly without waiting ages for their works to be translated. And who knows how far the power of AI may take us?
Sources and illustrations
Geo Comix press release, December 2021, https://www.youscribe.com/BookReader/Index/3261098/?documentId=4341002
Official site, https://www.geocomix.com
Artificial intelligence to translate manga and comics, Authôt, February 2022, https://www.authot.com/fr/2022/02/24/lintelligence-artificielle-pour-traduire-des-mangas-et-des-comics/
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