Notes on manga translation, AI tools, and the scanlation workflow
This site is a collection of notes from my experience translating raw manga. Whether you are a solo scanlator or part of a team, the landscape of manga translation tools has changed dramatically in the past couple of years. AI-powered translators have gone from novelty to genuinely useful, and I want to document what works.
The biggest shift I have seen is how AI manga translators handle context. Early tools would translate each text bubble independently, losing character voice and narrative flow. Modern tools understand the full page and keep dialogue consistent across panels.
The tool I have been using most is Manga Translator. It handles Japanese, Korean, and Chinese raws with solid accuracy, and the built-in editor lets you fix translations directly on the page without switching between apps.
There are thousands of manga, manhwa, and manhua titles that never get official English releases. Scanlation teams fill that gap, but the bottleneck has always been translation. A skilled Japanese-to-English translator might spend hours on a single chapter. AI tools do not replace human translators, but they dramatically speed up the first draft, letting translators focus on nuance and localization.
If you are new to translating manga, start with a short one-shot rather than an ongoing series. You will learn the workflow without committing to a long project. The basic pipeline is: clean the raw scans, extract text from bubbles, translate, typeset the English text back into the bubbles, and proofread.
An Manga Translator can handle most of these steps automatically. Upload your raw pages, get translations, edit them in the built-in editor, and export. What used to take a team of four people can now be done solo.
Curated lists of manga reading sites, streaming platforms, and entertainment resources organized by genre and category.