Meet NIUHI: A New Manga App ⋆ Soulcial Dreamin' Ent.

Anime NYC has been a bridge in many ways. Whether it’s opening our eyes to new experiences, a new manga, or sometimes even a new adventure. With the ever-growing anime and manga landscape, there’s always something to discover. This year wasn’t any different. For my manga heads, I would like to meet NIUHI. A new Manga app by KOMODO. Meet Niuhi

Q1: Hello, can you tell us a little bit about Niuhi and how it works? Meet NUIHI

NIUHI: Now in public Beta, NIUHI is a new manga platform where people can discover, purchase, sell, and translate high-quality indie manga. For customers, it’s currently available in Japan and the United States, and headed to other countries around the world very soon.

For creators, it is already worldwide – no matter where they live, they can sign up and sell their creations on NIUHI now.

It’s already bridging the gap between Japanese and English-speaking audiences.

And it is created by KOMODO, which brings years of experience delivering games from around the world to audiences everywhere, and whose employees all love manga.

Q2: How does the Niuhi translation tool differ from AI translations? Meet Niuhi

NIUHI: NIUHI’s community translation tools focus on human-powered translations, which allow for greater accuracy and nuance than AI-generated translations.

By offering both professional translations and allowing fans who purchase a work to provide custom translations, NIUHI offers multiple ways to better convey the finer details — such as the characters’ personalities and the atmosphere of the story.

It also makes it possible to translate into a wide variety of languages, including ones that are not yet common in manga translation, such as Tagalog in the Philippines, bringing the joy of manga to more people than ever before. These are a living set of tools that we update regularly, and we are excited to continue building on them with feedback from customers.

Q3: Manga is a Japanese medium, but is loved by people all over the world. How important was it to make your platform accessible to a global audience? What sort of challenges do you face in making this a reality?

NIUHI: It is perhaps our number one goal with NIUHI: To become the go-to place for both creators and manga/comic fans around the world, a platform that connects them with each other.

There are many high-quality indie manga in Japan, spanning a wide variety of genres and stories. However, there are few opportunities for these manga to be translated and sold overseas. And the same is true of manga and comics made in the West – those titles are extremely hard for fans in Asia to discover and purchase.

We see the demand for this at events like Comitia — a Japanese indie manga and art event — where the number of international visitors has been increasing every year. They enjoy discovering and digging up Japanese manga that are still unknown.

That demand also exists for fans outside of Japan: there are still countless interesting manga and comics around the world that haven’t been widely discovered. NIUHI aims to fix that.

Q4: When searching the app’s catalog, I found free-to-read titles in both Japanese and English. Do you plan to include featured titles in any other languages, or will translators and foreign mangaka do the heavy lifting? Meet Niuhi

NIUHI: Yes, definitely! Publishers and creators can offer their works in any language, and they ultimately control which translations are available to users on NIUHI, including community work.

Among the titles on NIUHI right now, there is a range of official languages that includes Japanese, English, and Traditional Chinese. And we hope that as the community grows, languages that don’t normally receive official translations will begin to receive them from community translators.

As more works get translated into other languages, the catalog will continue to grow and diversify.

Q5: I stumbled across a few stories from Oni Lion Forge Publishing. Are there any other collaborations down the line that we should know about? Meet NUIHI

NIUHI: Yes, but we can’t tell you yet! What we can say is that in the near future, there will be many, many more titles added. We hope many manga and comic fans enjoy discovering “new” manga and comics. Please stay tuned for more announcements!

That’s our interview with NIUHI. I hope you enjoyed this conversation just as much as we did. Be sure to check them out. As always, let me know what you think in the comment section below. Like and share if you’re really feeling generous. Thank you again for reaching out and taking the time to connect with us. Excited to see what’s next. Meet Niuhi

Connect with NIUHI

| NIUHI Instagram | Manga Platform |

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