Square Enix Is Fully Engaged in AI for Automatic Manga Translation
Tokyo startup Mantra — which builds AI tools for manga translation — said it has teamed up with Square Enix to co-develop an AI-assisted system for laying out manga pages. The collaboration follows Square Enix’s 2024 investment in Mantra.
The product, dubbed Mantra Engine, is intended to help with Japanese-language layout and text formatting. Mantra says the system relies on its existing image-recognition and style-evaluation modules from its AI translation suite and operates only on material already present in a manuscript, i.e., it does not generate new artwork or invent text. That’s the company line; skeptics will want to watch how that works in practice.
Square Enix reports that editorial staff currently spend more than 3,000 hrs/yr deciding font families, sizes, emphasis, and where each line of dialogue should sit on a page. The Mantra Engine project grew out of that crunch — an attempt to take routine, time-consuming tasks off human hands so editors can spend their time differently.
We built this tool to ease the load on editors by combining frontline editorial know-how with our (human) AI experience from over a decade in digital entertainment and Mantra’s tech. The aim isn’t simply higher throughput; it’s to let editors return to the creative parts of their job while routine layout work is handled by AI. KatsuYoshi Matsuura, Executive Director of Square Enix
Square Enix’s manga arm still centers on Monthly Shonen Gangan (think Full Metal Alchemist) and the Japan-only Gangan Online, while the company pushes its recent global digital play, Manga UP!
At the moment Mantra Engine is being tested and iterated inside Square Enix. If internal trials go well, the plan is to package the tool as a service for other publishers and studios across the manga industry.