English | Korean

MangoTL

MangoTL is an AI-powered manga, manhwa, webtoon, and comic image translator. It ships as a browser extension plus a self-hostable local server. The extension reads the selected image and uploads the image bytes to the server, then the server runs OCR, translates detected text with an OpenAI-compatible provider, and returns a rendered translated image.

View on Firefox Add-ons (As of 26/05/31, the add-on is still under review)

Add-on Screenshot

Image sample

• Lang: English to Korean
• Provider: OpenRouter
• Model: google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it model.

Supported Items

MangoTL supports a variety of websites, languages, AI providers, and OCR engines.

You can check the full list below.

Websites

• Pixiv

Source Languages (comic language)

• Japanese
• Korean
• English
• Chinese
• German
• Swedish

Target Languages (your language)

• Japanese
• Korean
• English
• Chinese
• German
• Swedish

AI Providers

• CrofAI
• OpenRouter
• OpenAI-compatible endpoints

Detection/OCR Engines

• PaddleOCR — detection, OCR
• manga-ocr (Japanese default) — OCR

Server Setup

1. Install dependencies.

   bun install

2. Create your environment file.

   cp .env.example .env

3. Add your provider API key and select your provider in .env. Below is an example using OpenRouter.

   OPENROUTER_API_KEY=your_api_key_here
   MANGOTL_AI_PROVIDER=openrouter

4. Start the server.

   bun run start

5. Check that the server is ready.

   curl http://localhost:8787/health

Operation Flow

1. Browser: The user clicks the button overlaid on the image. The browser sends the image information to the server.
2. Server: Downloads the image and extracts text using OCR engines such as PaddleOCR and manga-ocr.
3. Server: Sends the extracted text to the configured AI model for translation.
4. Server: Removes the original comic bubble text from the image, inserts the translated text on top, and sends the final image back to the browser.
5. Browser: Overlays the received image onto the original image. The user can now see the translated comic.

Extension Install

Install from Firefox Add-ons (recommended)

1. Firefox Add-ons to install.

Build and install manually

1. Build the release zip: bun run release:extension
2. In Firefox, open about:debugging → This Firefox → Load Temporary Add-on and select any file inside extension/.

Documentation

• Third-party software
• Contributing

License

MangoTL is free software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later).

Copyright © 2026 gpdir16 and MangoTL contributors.

If you modify this software and make it available to users over a network, you must provide the corresponding source code under the same license. See the AGPL FAQ for details.