Free guide · Oct 5, 2026
Koharu: translate a manga page on your own computer
A step-by-step setup guide with requirements, checks and common problems.
The short version
Koharu is a free, open source desktop app that translates manga and comics. It finds the speech bubbles, reads the text, translates it, paints the original lettering out of the art and typesets the translation back in. The vision models and the translation model can all run on your own machine, so nothing has to leave it.
•What you need: Windows, an Apple silicon Mac or Linux, a current graphics driver, and a GPU if you want it fast. CPU works, just much slower.
•What you get: a translated page you can export as a flat PNG, or as a layered PSD to finish in an image editor.
•How to start: install it, open one readable page, run all four stages on that page only, fix what it got wrong, export. Do a whole chapter after that.
What's in the full guide
- 01Will it run on my computer?
- 02What it downloads
- 03Step 1: Install it
- 04Step 2: Make a project and import one page
- 05Step 3: Pick the translation model
- 06Step 4: Translate the page
- 07Step 5: Fix what it got wrong
- 08Step 6: Export
- 09Honest notes on quality
- 10Honest notes on copyright
- 11Where to go next