Shueisha Runs AI-Translated Global Manga Community Site for 1 Month Only – Interest

There is no doubt manga’s popularity has grown over the past several decades. With that growth have come fandoms around the world. While online forums exist for these fans to interact, fans may have to create their little islands due to the language barrier. However, Japanese manga publisher Shueisha is trying to build a bridge between those metaphorical islands with its new service “MANGA Plus Universe by SHUEISHA.”

The official X (formerly Twitter) account for MANGA Plus Universe by SHUEISHA X announced the news on April 12, in celebration of MANGA Plus‘s fifth anniversary, the site hosts 15 Shueisha manga titles and forums for fans around the world to discuss the works. The titles include: Chainsaw Man, SPY x FAMILY, Kaiju No. 8, Blooming Love, and 【Oshi No Ko】, among others. It’s a service for MANGA Plus that allows manga fans to discuss, lament, and gush about the 15 titles on the platform.

However, the big question is how fans will read each other’s comments if they do not understand the language. According to the site, the comments are machine translated. There is “auto translation into nine languages.” The translated languages include: English, French, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, and Vietnamese. The English and Japanese translations are what you may expect from many machine translations services. In other words, the translations are accurate, though literal, and a bit stilted. It’s natural that the French, Indonesian, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, or Vietnamese translations would follow suit. Fans are interacting with each other despite the translation’s shortcomings.

According to the site, this is a limited time service. While the site doesn’t list the end date for this service, Comic Natalie has cited May 13 as the final day.

Sources: MANGA Plus Universe by SHUEISHA‘s website and X/Twitter account, Comic Natalie