LunaTranslator vs Manga Image Translator
LunaTranslator and Manga Image Translator are both document processing software. LunaTranslator is open source under GPL-3.0, with 14k GitHub stars. Manga Image Translator is open source under GPL-3.0, with 11k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick LunaTranslator when
- You play Japanese visual novels and want live translation.
- Pick Manga Image Translator when
- You want machine-translated manga pages and can run a GPU model locally.
Side by side
A Windows translator for visual novels that hooks game text or OCRs the screen and shows machine translations.
Detects text in manga and other images, translates it and redraws the translation onto the image.
Its text hooking can trip anti-cheat in some games, and docs are mostly Chinese.
Releases are still beta and the public demo site no longer works.
Production-ready
Usable
Desktop app
Self-hosted server and command line
C++ and Python
Python, PyTorch, Transformers and FastAPI
Open source, GPL-3.0 (strong copyleft) (both)
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license. (both)
14k GitHub stars
11k GitHub stars
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v12.1.3.8.
Established: started 5 years ago, latest release beta-0.3.
Other comparisons
More OCR and document parsing engines
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.