Sunday 1 June 2025, evening

I've spent the last month building a sort of gizmo and/or gadget for translating manga.

I've been learning Japanese for about two years now, and I'm at the point where I'm sort of okay at reading native material, but I'm regularly having to look up words, or I find myself staring at a sentence where I understand the individual words but not the overall meaning.

Thankfully, Japanese is a language well-loved by nerds, so there are lots and lots of great tools and resources online. Unfortunately, I am easily distracted, so if I put down the manga to look up a word, the odds of me getting side-tracked by something else on my phone are quite high. So I was looking for a less computer-based approach to the problem.

Now, every May Libby organises a thing called Mayke, where people try to make something every day. This year I got sucked into making a machine to help me with my manga woes.

I started out with a camera/projector setup, hoping to build a kind of scanning station that could projection map translations onto the text. However, it turns out to be a nightmare getting a static camera to focus on the tiny text in a typical manga volume.

Plan B was a cheap USB microscope, which worked well, but had such a narrow field of view that it needed a physical guide to align it with the text. Thankfully, the scope had almost exactly the same diameter as the mouth of a smoothie bottle that I pulled out of the recycling. I wired it all up with a Raspberry Pi and an E-Ink display that I've had lying around since who knows when.

I'd originally hoped to do everything on-device, but it quickly became clear that even if on-device OCR was possible, the translation wasn't going to happen, at least not on the Pi I was using. So I switched over to using an LLM (Gemini Flash), which worked great.

I'm pretty ambivalent about the LLM usage here — I don't like them in general, but I can't argue that translation is one of the tasks they're actually pretty good at. In fact, pretty much any modern machine translation system is going to be basically an LLM at heart. Still though, it'd be nice to move to something on-device, or at least on a server I control. Maybe for the next version.

The final task was to package the whole thing up. I recently acquired a 3d printer, and this was my first real 3d design project for it. I taught myself Fusion — I know a lot of people grumble about it and it definitely has its quirks, but I found that the approach really clicked with me. I ended up going with a bright and chunky primary colour look. I can 100% recommend the Bambu Labs Sunflower Yellow PLA filament, that stuff is beautiful.

Some stray thoughts:

• It's fun to make a little gizmo! Very much thanks to Libby for the push

• LLMs are, perhaps obviously, extremely good at language-based tasks. I'm surprised we're not seeing a lot more new language-learning tooling pop up

• Rendering Japanese text legibly at small pixel sizes is a nightmare

• I love the task of moving pieces around in 3d to pack a bunch of electronics into a small physical space. It scratches my brain just right

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