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YouTube Manga Toshokan Z Service Trials Auto-Translate Options Worldwide
posted on by Kim Morrissy
In December 2018, the free manga service Manga Toshokan Z launched a YouTube channel to make its featured titles more accessible. The legal service mainly focuses on distributing completed and/or out-of-print titles, and all YouTube ad revenue will go to the creators.
The service is currently experimenting in distributing manga in multiple languages using YouTube's automatic machine translation tool. UQ Holder and Negima! creator Ken Akamatsu personally asked his followers on Twitter to try out the feature and give feedback.
Hi, I'm Ken Akamatsu. Currently, we are conducting a trial of an automatic manga conversion service on YouTube.
— 赤松健 (@KenAkamatsu) March 19, 2019
New "Love Hina" motion pictures were released today. Please check them out to see if you can watch in your language with machine translation!https://t.co/0zZg9ctIMc
Akamatsu's classic romantic comedy manga Love Hina is one of the titles available on the service. On March 15, Manga Toshokan Z uploaded every volume onto its channel with Japanese closed-caption subtitles for every line of dialogue. A video of the first part of the first volume is below:
Akamatsu also posted about the experiment in Japanese, Korean, and traditional Chinese, and has been responding to feedback on Twitter.
The Manga Toshokan Z service first launched in 2015. Ken Akamatsu's Love Hina ran in Weekly Shōnen Magazine from 1998 to 2001. Tokyopop published the series in North America and Kodansha rereleased the series in an omnibus format. Akamatsu began his newest series UQ Holder! in Weekly Shōnen Magazine starting in 2013.
Source: Ken Akamatsu's Twitter account, Manga Toshokan Z's Youtube account
