Local LLM translation, Japanese OCR, and page-aware chat I’ve been working on Manga Translator Tool, an open-source desktop app for reading and translating manga locally. The idea is inspired by watching subbed anime: keep the original Japanese visible and provide a translation alongside it so you can follow the story. It combines a manga reader, OCR, translation overlays, and a companion LLM you can ask about the page. The models OCR: ebinan92/Qwen3.5-ocr-jp-2b, a Qwen 3.5 fine-tune for Japanese OCR, using GGUF conversions from nakanishi08/Qwen3.5-ocr-jp-2b-GGUF. Translation and chat: Gemma 4 E2B, using the HauhauCS/Gemma-4-E2B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive variant. Inference: llama.cpp, with CPU and GPU support. Demo Video walkthrough — includes the full setup process, so you can see what getting started actually involves. What makes it useful? Keep the original artwork and Japanese text. Translations appear in text boxes without erasing the source text. Save translations as image metadata. You can keep the results without permanently burning them into the artwork, then toggle between the original and translated views. Search the extracted text. Find dialogue and revisit your favorite moments in a manga volume. Read sound effects too. The OCR and translation pipeline can also pick up Japanese onomatopoeia—the characters that often go untranslated. Ask the companion LLM about the page. Choose what to include as context: the Japanese text, the translation, the image, or all three. You can ask about wording, cultural references, or possible localization choices. Setup The app handles setup and model downloads from inside the tool. On Windows, the executable manages the downloads, so you don’t need to install each component separately. Current limitations and design choices There’s no inpainting: preserving the Japanese text is part of the reading experience I’m aiming for. The translation boxes don’t blend into the artwork, and font customization isn’t available yet. This is aimed at reading and exploring manga. If your goal is polished typesetting or publication-ready localization, other tools are better suited to that workflow. Downloads — v1.00 Windows 10/11 x64 Linux x86_64 — experimental macOS — experimental source package Source code · itch.io   submitted by   /u/Gladioul666 [link]   [comments]