Manga and webtoon localization is a real, skilled, two-stage industry - translation, then typesetting and lettering - and it's one that has been publicly and repeatedly reported as underpaid. Understanding what that professional pipeline actually costs is the honest way to talk about where an automated first pass fits, and where it doesn't.
Two jobs, not one
Translating the dialogue and typesetting/lettering it back into the art are separate skills, usually done by separate people. Reporting from Anime News Network on the typesetting/lettering company Amimaru's 2020 statement about its own pay practices described per-page rates for that lettering work reported in the low single dollars per page - separate from, and in addition to, whatever the translation itself cost.
What translators have publicly said they're paid
Publishers Weekly's 2023 reporting, "Manga Freelancers Say, 'Show Me the Money,'" covered freelance manga translators organizing (forming the United Workers of Seven Seas with the Communications Workers of America) over rates they described as roughly $100-250 per chapter on weekly series, or in the neighborhood of $1,000-1,700 per month on monthly series - figures the reporting traced back to a rate cut following the manga market's 2007-2008 boom-and-bust that publishers were reported to have been slow to reverse, before those specific organizing efforts pushed rates up at some publishers. Separately, Anime News Network's 2021 reporting on the comics publisher INKR quoted the company acknowledging a rate of roughly one cent per character for Japanese-to-English translation, which it stated it had since moved toward an "industry average."
These are the specific numbers that were publicly reported at the time - worth clicking through to the original reporting below before quoting them elsewhere, since rates like these are contested and do shift.
Where an automated pass actually fits
None of this makes the case that automation should replace a paid professional pipeline on a commercial release - the reporting above is, if anything, an argument that the people doing this work are already underpaid, not a case for paying them less or not at all. What it does support is a narrower, honest claim: a fast, automated first pass - OCR to read the panels, an adapted draft of the dialogue with a stated reason for each creative choice, and an optional redraw of the lettering - is a useful starting point for a hobbyist, a fan project, or a professional's first draft, the same way machine-translation post-editing (MTPE) is an established way to combine MT speed with human review rather than a replacement for the human. See manga & webtoon translation for how that first pass actually works.