A free, open-source Chromium browser extension for reading manhwa, manhua, manga, and foreign-language webpages with instant word-by-word translation, readings, definitions, grammar hints, and pronunciation.
Manhua Lens is built for readers who want to understand Korean, Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, or Latin text directly on the page without constantly switching to a separate dictionary or translator.
Highlight a phrase and Manhua Lens opens a compact reading panel with sentence translation, dictionary results for individual words, romanized readings, part-of-speech information, Korean particle handling, and text-to-speech.
Reading comics and native webpages is one of the fastest ways to meet real vocabulary in context, but looking up every unfamiliar word can interrupt the flow. Manhua Lens keeps the lookup beside the text you are already reading.
It can be useful for:
- Manhwa readers learning Korean
- Manga readers learning Japanese
- Manhua readers learning Chinese
- Language learners reading articles, forums, blogs, and other webpages
- Anyone who wants a lightweight word-by-word browser dictionary and translator
- Select text on a webpage to open an instant translation panel
- Word-by-word offline dictionary lookup for 11 source languages
- Dictionary-aware Chinese and Japanese phrase segmentation instead of character-by-character lookup
- Sentence translation alongside individual word results
- Romanized readings and part-of-speech information where available
- Korean particle splitting and grammar labels
- Sentence and individual-word pronunciation using the browser text-to-speech API
- Works on regular webpages and embedded frames
- Bundled offline dictionaries for resilient word lookup
- Graceful offline results when the online sentence-translation service is unavailable
- Toolbar popup with language settings and a built-in page activation check
- Draggable, resizable, foldable reading panel with three viewing themes
- Expandable secondary dictionary meanings and a one-click re-read control
- Manifest V3 extension for Microsoft Edge and Chromium-based browsers
| Language | Offline headwords | Reading / language hints | Pronunciation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Korean | 32,859 | Romanization, particles, grammar labels | Yes |
| Japanese | 464,013 | Reading information where available | Yes |
| Chinese | 197,554 | Reading information where available | Yes |
| French | 163,407 | Part-of-speech information where available | Yes |
| Spanish | 96,625 | Part-of-speech information where available | Yes |
| Italian | 70,548 | Part-of-speech information where available | Yes |
| German | 143,736 | Part-of-speech information where available | Yes |
| Portuguese | 67,341 | Part-of-speech information where available | Yes |
| Czech | 48,917 | Part-of-speech information where available | Yes |
| Turkish | 41,672 | Part-of-speech information where available | Yes |
| Latin | 24,197 | Part-of-speech information where available | Device voice unavailable |
- Download or clone this repository.
- Open
edge://extensions. - Enable Developer mode.
- Click Load unpacked.
- Select this repository folder — the folder containing
manifest.json. - Allow Manhua Lens to run on all sites and refresh any tabs that were already open.
If a page does not respond to text selection, open Manhua Lens from Edge's Extensions menu. The settings popup checks whether the extension is active and can activate it on the current page.
Edge does not allow content extensions to run on protected pages such as
edge://URLs or the Edge Add-ons store.
- Choose the source and target languages from the toolbar popup.
- Highlight text on an
http://orhttps://webpage. - Read the sentence translation and word-by-word dictionary results in the popup panel.
- Use the speaker controls for the whole selection or an individual word.
- Clear the selection or press the panel's close button when finished.
Manhua Lens uses a Manifest V3 service worker together with an in-page content script. The content script detects selected text and displays the reading panel, while the background worker handles dictionary lookup, translation requests, language processing, and text-to-speech.
Bundled dictionaries allow individual-word results to remain available even when an online sentence-translation service cannot be reached.
Version 0.3 adapts the complete 11-language dictionary collection and several panel conveniences from Translation Lens Windows. Its published repository contains documentation rather than application source, so this is a compatible browser implementation—not a source-code merge. Native Windows Tesseract binaries cannot execute inside a Chromium extension; image OCR therefore remains separate from this selection-based release.
manifest.json— Manifest V3 extension configurationcontent.js/content.css— selection detection and translation panelbackground.js— dictionary lookup, translation, language processing, and text-to-speechoptions.html/options.js— language settings and page activation checkdictionaries/— bundled offline dictionary data and source notesicons/— extension icons
Dictionary provenance and transformation notes are documented in dictionaries/SOURCES.md.
Manhua Lens is an open-source manhwa, manga, and manhua reading assistant, Korean/Japanese/Chinese dictionary extension, and word-by-word translation browser extension for language learning and native-content reading.
0.3.0
Bug reports, language-data improvements, UI refinements, and feature suggestions are welcome through GitHub Issues.
If you find Manhua Lens useful, starring the repository helps other readers and language learners discover the project through GitHub.