Mantra is developing AI translation technology for manga and other entertainment content, driven by our mission to “deliver manga in the world’s languages.” In recent years, rapid advancements in technologies like large language models (LLMs) have dramatically improved machine translation accuracy. What was once technically impossible is now achievable, and the value technology can create continues to expand.
You will be conducting research and development related to translating entertainment content like manga. The primary mission involves developing technologies to improve translation accuracy and streamline translation workflows.
Translating manga requires not only machine translation of text but also understanding manga images (OCR and character recognition) and editing images (text removal and style generation). Therefore, you will tackle all challenges related to multimodal understanding and generation involving language and images.
Responsibilities
Research and development projects including
- Open-sourced LLM models
- Automatic evaluation methods for entertainment MT
- Multimodal MT for manga / comics
- OCR for onomatopoeia on manga / comics
- ML-based typesetting engine for manga translation
Requirements
- Research and development experience in natural language processing or image recognition
- Master’s or Ph.D. in machine learning, or at least 2 years of relevant work experience
- Experience formulating research plans and executing research that resulted in peer-reviewed publications (or equivalent)
- Experience implementing machine learning model training and improving task accuracy
- Experience researching English-language papers
- Conversational Japanese language skills. You’ll occasionally speak with our clients in Japanese, but we don’t expect you to be fully fluent in the language.
Nice to haves
While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following.
- Expertise in natural language processing or image processing
- Development experience utilizing cutting-edge technologies such as large language models and diffusion models
- Experience as first author of papers accepted at international conferences or journals in the machine learning field
- Practical experience as a machine learning engineer
- Project management and execution experience, including machine learning Proof of Concept (PoC) projects
- Experience in application development for web services and similar platforms
- Strong interest in Mantra’s focus areas (manga, language, machine learning)
Compensation
¥6,000,000 ~ ¥10,000,000 annually.
