MashiroSaber03/Saber-Translator
A desktop manga translator that actually cleans up the art
Saber-Translator runs locally as a web app, detects speech bubbles, OCRs Japanese text, translates via your choice of AI provider, then inpaints the original text and renders new Chinese text back in.
Velocity · 7d
+6.9
★ / day
Trend
→steady
star history
What it does
Saber-Translator is a Python desktop app (packaged as .exe for Windows) that launches a local web server at localhost:5000. You feed it manga pages as images or PDFs; it detects text bubbles with DBNet/CTD/YOLO, runs OCR through MangaOCR or PaddleOCR, sends text to translation APIs (SiliconFlow, DeepSeek, Gemini, Volcano, Ollama, Sakura, etc.), erases the original Japanese with LAMA inpainting, and renders Chinese text with custom fonts, colors, and positioning. The whole pipeline is visual and editable.
The interesting bit
The “high-quality translation mode” (Beta) is the unusual angle: it batches multiple pages together and sends them to multimodal models with surrounding context, so cross-page dialogue stays coherent. There’s also a full “Manga Insight” analysis engine that builds a vector database of the comic’s plot and characters, then answers natural-language questions via RAG with hybrid retrieval and rerankers.
Key highlights
- Modular pipeline: swap text detectors, OCR engines, translators, and inpainting methods independently
- Edit mode: manually draw, move, or resize text boxes; tweak every font property with live preview
- Bookshelf system: organize works by book/chapter/tag, with progress saved per chapter and a built-in reader
- Export options: PNG, ZIP, PDF, or CBZ
- Session save/load: full work state preserved, plus JSON import/export for collaboration
Caveats
- The “high-quality mode” is explicitly marked Beta and burns more API quota and time; the README warns you need sufficient API key balance
- No macOS/Linux binaries mentioned; Windows
.exeis the primary distribution path, with QQ groups as a download channel alongside GitHub Releases - The RAG reranker list cuts off mid-sentence in the README (“支持 Jina、Cohere、SiliconFlow、BGE 等”), so full supported providers are unclear
Verdict
Worth a look if you read untranslated manga and want a local, visual, tweakable pipeline rather than a black-box web service. Skip it if you need official commercial releases or don’t want to manage your own API keys.