Editorial scope
What we cover
This is a description of what ScanlationHub writes about, how we approach it, and what we deliberately don't cover. We write it because we'd rather be clear than have readers arrive expecting something different.
Coverage area 01
Translation craft and decisions
The specific choices translators make — how to handle terms without direct English equivalents, when to keep honorifics and when to drop them, how to approach culturally embedded references — and the arguments those choices create. We're interested in this as craft, not as morality.
Includes: translation theory applied to manga, domestication vs foreignization debates, specific translation problems and how different groups have handled them, comparisons of approaches across groups working on the same source material.
Coverage area 02
Scanlation history and group culture
The history of how fan translation developed — the IRC era, the move to web distribution, the emergence of platform aggregators, the relationship between fan groups and publishers. The organizational cultures of different groups, what made certain teams develop reputations, and how those reputations were built or lost.
Includes: historical accounts of major groups, the technical and social infrastructure of the IRC era, how distribution mechanisms changed the practice, and what the landscape looks like now relative to where it started.
Coverage area 03
Technical craft: typesetting, cleaning, QC
The non-translation technical work in a scanlation pipeline — cleaning scans, typesetting dialogue, quality checking finished chapters. This is covered as documentation of craft skills, not as tutorials. The people who do this work well rarely write about it, and we think there's value in describing what it actually involves.
Includes: typesetting technique and its effect on reading experience, the cleaning process, what quality checking actually involves, tools and their trade-offs, how the pipeline functions when it works and what breaks it when it doesn't.
What we don't cover
What ScanlationHub is not
We don't track releases. We don't link to reading sites. We don't maintain a database of active groups or series. We don't review chapters. We don't rank translations or maintain "best group" lists. We don't cover licensing news as a beat — if a series gets licensed, that matters, but we're not a news site and we don't try to be first.
Scope note: We write in English about manga translation. We don't cover other comics translation traditions, though they share many of the same problems. If you're here for anime dubbing or subtitle debates, we're probably not the right resource.
Questions about specific coverage areas, or suggestions for topics we haven't addressed? We don't have an editorial submissions process, but we read everything sent to us. Get in touch.