scanlationhub.com — editorial on fan translation

The craft behind the chapter

Reading a fan-translated manga means relying on dozens of invisible decisions — word choice, typesetting, line breaks, cultural notes. This is where we write about those decisions.

Title Type Section Date
What typesetting actually does to how you read On fonts, spacing, and the invisible grammar of the page
Dispatch
Craft
Jun 2025
The groups that defined the medium A history of the teams who shaped how manga reached the world
Dispatch
History
May 2025
What "good" means in manga translation Domestication, foreignization, and the debates that never end
Dispatch
Theory
Apr 2025
Reading Japanese onomatopoeia as a translator Why sound effects are harder than plot
Field Note
Language
Mar 2025
Quality checking: the last person in the chain A look at what QC actually involves in a scanlation pipeline
Craft
Process
Feb 2025
Long-form pieces published
Scanlation groups documented
Covering the craft since

Three angles on one subject

Longer essays on scanlation history, group culture, and how fan translation has evolved over twenty years. These pieces take time to read and are written for people who want that.

Read the dispatches →

Technical writing about the actual work: typesetting, translation editing, cleaning, quality checking. The people who do this work rarely write about it publicly. We try to change that.

Explore the craft section →

Shorter observations: a translation choice that stopped us cold, a forum thread from 2007 that explains something about today, a glossary term that everyone uses but nobody defines. Occasional, when there's something worth noting.

Browse field notes →

Common questions

No. ScanlationHub does not link to reading sites, host chapters, or track releases. What we do is write about the process — how translations are made, who makes them, and what decisions shape what you read.
A scanlation is a manga chapter scanned from print, translated by volunteers, and distributed online. The word combines "scan" and "translation." The practice started in the early 2000s and built most of the Western manga readership that exists today. It's a significant piece of cultural history, however uncomfortable that makes some publishers.
Two editors with backgrounds in linguistics and publishing. See the About Us page for specifics. We do not publish anonymous material, and we do not accept affiliate-driven content.
We publish edited, authored pieces — not crowd-sourced entries or discussion threads. Each piece has a named author, a perspective, and a point. We take positions on things. A wiki tends not to.