Read doujinshi in your language.
Self-published work almost never gets an official translation. Drop a page in — Sumi reads the bubbles, erases the Japanese and letters your language back into the art. One page free, no account.
What a doujin page does to a translator
Doujinshi is harder than commercial manga in four specific ways. Here is how Sumi handles each of them.
Bubbles, not a caption bar
The translation goes inside the balloon the original text came out of, at the size that fits it. Nothing is pasted over the drawing, and you can flip back to the original at any time.
Vertical Japanese stays vertical
Tall CJK bubbles are typeset in columns, right to left, the way they were drawn — not rotated ninety degrees into a sideways line.
It admits what it cannot read
Handwriting and drawn sound effects are genuinely hard. Regions Sumi is not confident about are marked rather than filled with a confident-sounding guess.
Every page, or just this one
Use the tool here for a single page. For a whole book, the Chrome and Safari extensions translate as you read, and the iPhone, iPad and Mac app imports a folder or a ZIP.
Doujin translation questions
- What is a doujin translator?
- A tool that reads the Japanese inside a doujinshi page and puts your language back in its place. Doujinshi is self-published work, so almost none of it is ever licensed or officially translated — if you want to read it, machine translation is usually the only option there has ever been.
- How do I translate a doujin page?
- Drop the page into the translator above, or paste a screenshot with Ctrl/Cmd V. Sumi finds the speech bubbles, reads them, erases the original lettering and re-typesets your language inside the same bubble. The first page is free and needs no account.
- Does it handle handwritten text?
- Better than most, but this is the hard part of doujinshi specifically. Printed bubbles are reliable. Handwritten asides in the margins, and sound effects drawn into the art, are where any translator struggles — Sumi flags the regions it is unsure about instead of inventing a line, so you can see what it could not read.
- Does vertical Japanese work?
- Yes. Tall bubbles keep true vertical typesetting rather than being rotated sideways, which is the usual failure mode when a general-purpose image translator meets a doujinshi page.
- Can I download the translated page?
- Yes — you get a PNG at the original resolution with the translation lettered into the art. Downloading needs a free account; translating the page does not.
- Where should I get doujinshi?
- From the artists and the shops that pay them: pixiv and pixiv BOOTH, DLsite, Melonbooks, Toranoana, and the events themselves. Sumi does not host, index, crawl or link to any of it — it only translates a page you opened yourself.
Reading a whole book, not one page?
The browser extension translates as you scroll, and the app imports a folder or a ZIP and keeps the whole thing in one library.