Japanese image translator: translate Japanese images to English

Upload a photo or screenshot that contains Japanese, choose English as the target, and you get a new image with English text where the Japanese was, in the same layout. Japanese has traps that a quick translation can miss (vertical columns, tiny furigana, era-based dates), so this page also tells you what to check before you trust or share the result. Going the other way? See translate images into Japanese.

What people translate from Japanese, and where to start

If you need the opposite, such as your own business card in Japanese, the bilingual Japanese business card guide covers it.

How to translate a Japanese image to English

1. Start with a sharp, straight image. Furigana is much smaller than the kanji it sits beside, so in a photo of a package, move closer instead of zooming. Crop to the text you need with the crop tool. JPG, PNG or WebP, up to 10 MB. For a PDF, export or screenshot the page first: the uploader accepts images only.
2. Upload it to the image translator. Set the source to Japanese or leave it on auto-detect.
3. Choose English as the target language.
4. Pick the mode that matches the image in the Business type menu, shown on wide screens (signed-in users can also save a default business type in their profile). Manga / comics asks the model to keep the reading flow and bubble placement, Technical documentation to keep the hierarchy and translate measurements correctly, Marketing to keep the brand voice and tone. Default mode suits everything else.
5. Add your rules on the Pro plan or above. The custom AI instructions field (up to 1,000 characters) accepts notes such as "Keep product names as printed in Latin letters on the pack" or "Translate 賞味期限 as Best before and 消費期限 as Use by".
6. Download and review with the checklist further down.

Five things that make Japanese images harder

Vertical text and right-to-left columns

In vertical writing (tategaki), characters run top to bottom and the columns run from right to left, as the W3C's Requirements for Japanese Text Layout describes. Manga pages use it, and so can book covers, labels and signs, sometimes next to horizontal text on the same surface. Columns read in the wrong order give sentences in the wrong order. In our sample below, the English came out as horizontal lines in the bubbles; check that the sentences still follow the original order.

Furigana, the small kana beside the kanji

Furigana (ruby) shows how a kanji is read, and it can also show a meaning: the W3C's Rules for Simple Placement of Japanese Ruby describe ruby as displaying the reading or the meaning of the base characters. In our sample below, 銃 ("gun") carries the reading ピストル ("pistol"), and the English says "A PISTOL?". In a blurry photo, furigana is hard to tell apart from the main text: check that it did not turn into extra words in the English.

Four writing systems in one line

A single label can mix kanji, hiragana, katakana and Latin letters, as in "ビタミンCを1000mg配合" (contains 1000 mg of vitamin C). Katakana loanwords look English but often mean something else: マンション is an apartment or condo, not a mansion; コンセント is a power outlet; クレーム is a complaint. Check that the English uses the Japanese meaning.

Politeness that English does not mark

Japanese notices often use very polite forms, and a literal translation can sound stiff ("We humbly ask that you kindly refrain from..."); plain English ("Please do not...") is usually right. Name suffixes such as さん, 様 or 先生 have no single English equivalent: decide whether to keep them or drop them, and say so in the custom AI instructions (Pro plan or above).

Dates, eras and prices

• 2026年10月3日 is 3 October 2026. Documents and labels can also use era years: the Reiwa era has been used since 1 May 2019 (Prime Minister's Office), so 令和8年 is 2026.
• Food labels separate 消費期限 (use by, a safety limit) from 賞味期限 (best before, a quality limit); neither should become a vague "expiry date". The Consumer Affairs Agency's own example prints a best-before date as "25.12.1" (CAA, PDF in Japanese). The order is year.month.day, and the year can be Western or Reiwa: Osaka Prefecture's guide lists 令和5年11月1日, 5.11.1, 2023.11.1 and 23.11.1 as ways to write the same date (Osaka Prefecture, in Japanese).
• Prices use ¥ or 円, with 税込 (tax included) or 税抜 (before tax). 1万円 is ¥10,000: count the zeros.

What our manga sample shows

This is the Japanese → English sample we use on the site: the English page is our tool's output, generated from the Japanese page shown first. For a full manga workflow, see the manga translator.

What worked:

• Every vertical bubble now holds horizontal English lettering in a comic style. The panels and page number are kept.
• The furigana-glossed 銃 became "A PISTOL?", following the reading the author chose, and 楽しくいこうぜ何事も! became "LET'S HAVE FUN WITH EVERYTHING!".

What a reviewer must fix:

• In the bottom-left panel, the large bubble now says "IT'S NOT, FREE-DOM!", a line that appears nowhere on the Japanese page. The real line (roughly "but it's the truth") was moved into the small bubble below it, together with that bubble's own "right?".
• In the last panel, the large hand-drawn は of a drawn-out "haa" sound is still in Japanese, and an English "HUH!" was added beside it, in a speech bubble the original panel does not have.
• Small details of the art were redrawn: in the bottom-left panel, the lettering on a crew member's headband is gone. Compare the drawing too, not only the text.

Every bubble looks filled, which is why these errors are easy to miss. Compare bubble by bubble, in the original reading order.

Review checklist for a translated Japanese image

• Numbers: prices, 万 amounts, mg and ml values, dosage, phone numbers and postal codes (〒) match the original digit for digit.
• Dates: era years converted correctly; best-before and use-by kept distinct.
• Names: product, brand and place names match the romaji printed on the item or the official English name. 渋谷 should stay Shibuya, not be translated word by word.
• Order: vertical columns and manga panels read right to left.
• Coverage: nothing left in Japanese (small print, stamps, furigana fragments) and nothing added.
• Safety text: 注意 (caution), 警告 (warning) and allergen lines checked against the original before you eat, apply or take anything.

When another tool is the better choice

• Reading something right now: a camera translation app on your phone is made for reading on the spot.
• One kanji, a seal stamp (hanko) or brush calligraphy: an image translator gives you a translated image, not the identity of one stylized character. A kanji dictionary with handwriting input or a person who reads Japanese can identify it.
• Copying the Japanese or English as text: TranslateMyImage returns an image, not editable text. A chat assistant or an OCR tool gives you text; our guide on whether you can ChatGPT translate images compares the options.
• Contracts, certificates, medical or official documents: use a professional translator.
• Chinese or Korean, not Japanese? Chinese uses many of the same characters but no kana: see the Chinese image translator. For Hangul, see the Korean image translator.