The short answer first: scanlation is a blend of scan and translation, and it means a comic translated by fans rather than by a publisher. The people who do it are scanlators, usually working together as a scanlation group.
The "scan" is literal history. The first scanlations really were printed volumes scanned page by page. Today most manhwa and manhua are published online only, so raws are saved from web and app releases rather than scanned — but the name stuck.
How a scanlation gets made
Getting one chapter from raw to readable usually takes five jobs. In a group each one may belong to a different person; a solo fan does all five.
- 1Raws: the original, untranslated pages. Paged manga comes from scanned or digital volumes; long-strip series come from the platforms they are serialised on.
- 2Translation: every line of dialogue, narration and sound effect translated, usually into a script numbered by page and bubble.
- 3Cleaning and redrawing: the original text erased. Text inside a white bubble is easy; text laid over artwork, and drawn-in sound effects, mean rebuilding the picture underneath.
- 4Typesetting: the translation set back into the bubbles — font, size and line breaks chosen so it looks drawn there rather than pasted on.
- 5Proofreading and QC: a full read of the finished pages for mistranslations, missed lines, typos and layout problems.
The slow part is almost never the translation. On a full-colour long-strip chapter, cleaning and typesetting routinely take longer than translating does.
Long strip versus paged comics
Paged comics, mostly manga, are hard because of reading order and vertical text: right to left, panels interlocking, and vertical lines in tall narrow bubbles that have to be re-broken when they become horizontal English. Black-and-white screentone is comparatively forgiving to clean.
Long strip, mostly manhwa and manhua, is one enormous vertical image. The usual approach is to cut it into sections, work on each, and stitch them back — and the cuts have to avoid bubbles and text, or a sentence ends up split across two files. That is most of what people mean by "how to scan manhwa" today. Because long strip is full colour, the art under the text is often a gradient or a detailed background, which makes cleaning harder.
The tools scanlators use
- Image editing: Photoshop is the most common, with GIMP, Clip Studio Paint and Krita used for cleaning and typesetting too.
- Long-image handling: scripts and small utilities to split and stitch long-strip chapters into editable sections.
- Translation aids: dictionaries, glossaries, and increasingly machine translation and OCR for a first draft.
- Coordination: shared documents for scripts and term lists, so character names and recurring terms stay consistent across chapters.
What a "scanlation app" can actually do
Most people searching for a scanlation app want one tool that recognises, translates, cleans and typesets in one go. That is exactly where AI image translation has improved fastest: detecting bubbles and on-art text, translating, erasing the original and rebuilding the background, and setting the translation back in place can now happen in a single pass.
It does not replace a proofreader. Machines still miss character voice, puns, cultural references and term consistency across chapters, and someone has to decide whether each sound effect is translated, kept or annotated. The realistic workflow is an AI first draft that is already readable, with a person revising the lines that matter.
The copyright part, plainly
Scanlation is unofficial. Translating and publicly distributing someone else's work without permission infringes copyright in most countries, whether or not anyone is charged for it, and many creators and publishers object to fan translations circulating once an official release exists.
When a series is officially licensed in your language, buying or reading it there is the most direct way to keep the artist drawing. Translating something to read yourself, to study a language, or because you hold the rights to it is a different matter.
A tool can cut cleaning and typesetting from hours to minutes. It answers how to do the work, not whether you may publish it — that depends on the licence, not the software.
Trying it
PicTranslate's Manga Mode detects bubbles and on-art text, handles vertical text and right-to-left reading order, erases the original and rebuilds the background, then redraws the translation in place. Long-strip images are segmented automatically so text in the middle is not missed. Upload a page of your own raws and see how much cleaning and typesetting the first draft saves.
