America to Become Ground Zero for Shogakukan’s AI Novel Translation Revolution
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Despite fan and industry worry over AI-translated media, one of Japan’s biggest manga and light novel publishers, Shogakukan, will launch a new light novel distribution service in North America by the end of the year.
Via Manga Alerts on X (formerly Twitter), Nikkei’s new report “Shogakukan to use AI translation on a light novel app for anime-related works in North America” revealed that Shogakukan (Case Closed, Doraemon, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End) will launch the new app Novelus by the end of 2024. The app will be available in the United States and Canada, leveraging the AI software called Mantra for rapid translation. Mantra will be used to “cut translation costs in half and increase the number of works.”
Novelus’ launch follows Shogakukan’s initial investment in Mantra in June this year. It was reported that it, along with Shueisha, Kadokawa, Square Enix and others had formed a consortium to invest around $4.8 million in the company, first founded in 2020 by staff at the University of Tokyo. Mantra is already being used to provide official translations for popular manga titles like One Piece, Spy x Family, Kengan Ashura and The Ancient Magus’ Bride in select languages. In its press release, Mantra revealed that it currently translates 100,000 pages of manga/comics per month. Novelus also follows Shogakukan’s investment in Orange, a startup similarly aiming to translate manga using AI. Notably, it sets the massive target of translating over 50,000 manga over the next five years.
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