Boblov

Inspiration

ever since we were little, we loved reading manga. So, we wanted to provide an extension that allowed non-Japanese manga lovers to read English-translated mangas more accessible. We want to share our love and passions for manga with everybody and spread joy in this world <3

What it does

Boblov translates Japanese raw manga pages to English.

How we built it

• JS because chrome extensions
• Created a flask API to request translation and typeset translated text back onto speech bubbles
• The api uses opencv to view the image, pytesseract OCR to transcribe the japanese text from the image, and then translate it using the Google Translate API
• Our project is completed through two repositories (both are linked below):
  • The main extension is in the boblov repo
  • The image replacement and translation is done through our flask api in the manga-translation-api repo

Challenges we ran into

• javascript was bad so we used flask
• heroku used slugs instead of snails so we resorted to localhost 😔
  • still works on heroku, the slug size was just too small for our dependencies 😭😭

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We're proud that we completed a working early product of Blobov in such a short amount of time.
• the github readme

What we learned

• We learned how to use Chrome Extension API with Javascript, including some minor frontend development
• Learned how to read an image using OpenCV, then transcribe the text on said image using pytesseract
• Using APIs we know nothing about, including the Google Translate API and pytesseract for image to string conversion

What's next for Boblov

• Make it work on more sites than just senmanga
• Improve translation qualitiy
• Improve text readability and sizing

Built With

• css
• flask
• google-translate
• html
• javascript
• opencv
• python
• tesseract