About
What this site is
ScanlationHub is an editorial resource focused on fan translation craft and scanlation culture. It started in 2019 as a place to write seriously about a subject that didn't have much serious writing about it.
The position
Scanlation is treated, in most coverage that exists, as either a legal problem or a fandom footnote. We don't think either framing captures what actually happened and what continues to happen — which is a set of volunteer-driven craft practices that shaped how an entire generation of Western readers encountered manga.
The work involves real skills. Translation, obviously, but also typesetting, image cleaning, quality editing, pipeline management across distributed volunteer teams. Most of this is done without pay, without much recognition, and without much documentation.
We write about it as craft — the way a magazine might document any skilled practice that doesn't get enough attention. We don't treat the legal questions as the main story. We're not interested in the debate about whether scanlation should exist. We're interested in what it is and how it works.
Editorial standards
Every piece published on ScanlationHub has a named author. We don't publish anonymous material. Authors write from their own knowledge and research, and where we make claims about history or practice, we try to be specific about the basis for those claims.
We don't have sponsors. We don't carry affiliate links. We don't run ads. The site has no commercial relationship with any scanlation group, aggregator site, or publisher. When we have opinions — and we do — they're ours.
If something we've published is factually incorrect, we want to know. Use the contact page.
The editors
Nora Vandenberghe
Editor, Translation Coverage
Nora studied applied linguistics at Ghent University and worked for five years as a localization project manager for a Brussels-based translation agency before founding ScanlationHub. Her academic background is in contrastive linguistics, specifically Japanese-Dutch pairs, which she's redirected toward writing about English fan translation. She covers translation theory, craft decisions, and the theoretical debates that run through the scanlation community.
LinkedIn profile →Casper Cornelis
Editor, History and Culture
Kasper has a background in media history, with a master's thesis on the European distribution of Japanese popular culture in the 1990s and early 2000s. He spent several years as an archivist before switching to writing. He was an active participant in scanlation communities during the IRC era, which gives him firsthand knowledge of how those spaces functioned. He covers group history, distribution infrastructure, and the cultural context of how fan translation developed.
LinkedIn profile →