Do iOS comic translation apps support translation of text from right-to-left languages like Japanese or Korean, and how well do they handle the reading order?

Yes, most major iOS comic translation apps, particularly Google Translate, Papago, and Microsoft Translator, support the translation of text from right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Japanese (which is typically read top-to-bottom, right-to-left for manga) and Korean (usually read left-to-right, top-to-bottom, but with specific character structures). These apps are designed to recognize and process text in these scripts. **How well they handle reading order:** - **OCR Recognition:** The OCR engines are generally trained to recognize characters and words in Japanese and Korean scripts effectively. - **Translation Accuracy:** Translation quality for these languages, especially Japanese and Korean, is often quite good, as these are frequently used source languages for machine translation models due to the abundance of data. - **Reading Order within a panel:** The biggest challenge often lies in correctly inferring the *reading order* of speech bubbles or text blocks within a complex comic panel, particularly for manga, which traditionally reads right-to-left. While the apps will translate the individual text blocks correctly, they might not always present the *sequence* of translated blocks in the original comic's reading order. Users might need to manually piece together the narrative by translating each bubble one by one. - **Vertical Text:** Japanese manga often features vertical text. Modern OCR is generally capable of recognizing vertical text, but how the translated horizontal text is then displayed over or alongside the original can vary by app. Some apps do a better job of maintaining a visually sensible flow.