A New Manga Platform, “Mantra Limited Test Ver.” Has Been Released

Manga fans can get manga in 5 languages; English, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish.

Tokyo. (March 6, 2020) — Mantra Inc. released a new manga platform, “Mantra Limited Test Ver.” (https://mantracomics.com). On the platform, manga fans can purchase Japanese manga in 5 languages. “Mantra Engine”, Mantra's machine translation technology for comics is used to translate the manga titles quickly and accurately.

The titles on “Mantra Limited Test Ver.” are translated into English and Chinese automatically. Followed by manual modification by professional translators, the translated English versions are then translated into French, German, and Spanish automatically. The whole pipeline has decreased translation costs by more than 50%.

The “Mantra Engine” not only decreases the cost, but also accelerates the translation speed. “Most of the titles we released on the platform were translated into 5 languages in one week. In the future, we want all manga to be released at the same time all over the world,” said Shonosuke Ishiwatari, CEO of Mantra Inc.

The platform is released for a limited-time test. All the titles can be purchased until May 31st, 2020. During the period, Mantra Inc. will release newly translated contents on the platform. After the test period, users will be able to access the purchased titles in PDF format.

Mantra Inc. is a startup company that “delivers manga in the world's languages.” For Japanese manga (comics), there are many problems with expanding to international markets: Translation costs are too high. Going from translation to actual publication is too slow. And, there are only a few channels for purchasing translated manga. Mantra provides machine translation technologies and a multilingual distribution service that solves the issues with translation cost, distribution speed, and shortage of sales channels.