‘Shimoneta’ Publisher Shogakukan To Use AI Translations For New Light Novel Reading App ‘Novelus’
An upcoming light novel reading app from Japanese publisher Shogakukan will be using AI technology to localize its featured works for English-speaking audiences.
As detailed Japanese financial news outlet Nikkei, the app, named ‘Novelus’, will allow users to freely access an ever-growing selection of the publisher’s various light novel offerings, including such Shimoneta: A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist, Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! (JP: Ore, Tsuintēru ni Narimasu), and the Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End prequel novel Frieren the Novel: Prelude.
In terms of the app’s user interface, the light novels available on Novelus will be presented in a continuous, vertical-scrolling style rather than a typical, distinctly-separated-by-page horizontal format.
Further, character dialogue will be shown not in bare paragraphs of standard text, but in formatted speech bubbles adorned with icons indicating which specific character is speaking.
Set to launch in both the United States and Canada by the end of 2024, the app is currently planned to add a massive 400 titles to its library in its first two years.
According to the publisher, this aggressive push to reach foreign readers is being motivated in large part by Japan’s declining birth rates, as the prospects of ever-shrinking home markets have led many local companies to begin placing their bets for growth on outside audiences.
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To this end, in order to meet this output goal and cut their production costs in half, Shogakukan will be using the Mantra AI translation engine to localize the works added to Novelus.
Developed by the Japanese tech start-up Mantra Co. for use on manga and webtoons, rather than just literally translating a given work, the engine takes story, dialogue, and panel context into account to produce more accurate localizations.
“By combining our manga image recognition technology with a large-scale language model (LLM), translation can take into account character and story information extracted from the images,” explains the company of their engine’s mechanics. “By considering a longer context than traditional machine translation, which translates each sentence independently, it is possible to maintain consistency in translation style and character tone throughout the work.”
This process performed by members of Mantra Co. themselves, these AI localizations are then passed off to human editors for a final review before ultimately being submitted to the source material’s respective publisher.
Far from a bit player in the Japanese publishing scene, the Mantra Engine has already been used to produce such localizations as the ongoing English simulpubs of The Ancient Magus’ Bride and the Vietnamese releases of both One Piece and Spy x Family.
Further, as of June 2024, Mantra Co. has managed to raise “a total approximately 780 million yen” in funding from such leading manga and light novel publishers as Shogakukan, Kadokawa, and Square Enix Holdings.
At current, it is unknown which light novels, nor specifically how many, will be featured on Shogakukan’s Novelus app when it hits US and Canadian app stores later this year.
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