What the fuck?

Yeah, that’s a loaded statement, but I am exaggerating only slightly.

So here’s some vague and useless stats for Lithuanian manga scanlations on MangaDex (by far the biggest and most popular manga fan-translation site):

Ok, I know the percentages are the same, but bear with me. I swear they were computed by adding up and dividing different numbers. The most important part though is that 58% is indeed over 50%.

For now, though, let’s have another table, this time rewinding back to the good old days… of 2024. Unavailable chapters did not exist back then (which makes the table format quite useless), however I like the way tables look:

Wow! That’s even better for my ego! Honestly, I’d like to leave it right here and revel in my well-deserved glory, but it would be a bit shady of me to just leave the numbers like that, so I’ll answer some strawman questions you may be having.

I’ve never even heard of MangaDex.

Are you sure you didn’t just upload your shitty translations to some random godforsaken website that no one uses and call it a day?

No. When I say that MangaDex is THE site to upload fan translations of manga, I mean it. That’s not to say that that’s the main place one would go to read manga, but it is the main hub to upload it.

Sure, there’s lots of sites you may like, but at the end of the day, unless they’re the official source of the manga, they’re likely just an aggregator scraping MangaDex and private scanlator sites.

Ok, who cares?

🥹🥹 I do.

Daaamn, you must have been scanlating for a long time.

2 months.

OHHH, SO YOU WERE THE ONE WHO DID THAT??

Yeah, ok. I know no one read them, don’t make fun of me. It was fun for me and is that not enough?

So what’s the catch?

Well you see, it’s a matter of linguistic difference between a translator and a scanlator.

Ok, what’s a scanlator then?

Scanlators are people who have taken it upon themselves to translate a manga that they love into their own language. That usually implies an arduous process of:

• buying original manga tankōbon volumes,
• unbinding them,
• scanning their pages with a scanner (that’s where the name scanlator comes from),
• processing them digitally,
• removing original text,
• redrawing artwork,
• translating the text,
• typesetting and
• rereading everything 100 times to ensure you didn’t leave out a typo.

Translators on the other hand do such work professionally. They usually get the raw page images from the publisher and have a license to sell their translations to the general public.

While my description of the translator’s job is much less emotive, don’t get me wrong – they are the reason that the medium has managed to receive any semblance of mainstream success.

As yet, as romantic as it sounds, the position of a scanlator is no longer as it used to be. Both with a growing audience and with a growing supply of manga, manhwa (Korean comics) and manhua (Chinese comics), the scanlator landscape is as fierce as it has ever been. There’s hundreds of groups that have carved out their own niches, that compete amongst each other to scanlate harder, better, faster and stronger.

The groups grow their brands, do advertising and outreach, and even hire actual translators and typesetters. Surprisingly it’s not even uncommon for groups to wage all out warfare against each other. A manga that a group has reserved for itself is its sacred ground and if someone threatens it, if someone snipes their chapters, the consequences are dire. Look at r/scanlationdrama. It has over 50k users. 50k! That’s actually insane.

Scanlation is not a thing you do for passion anymore. There’s loads of money to be made by reselling translated chapters to eager readers, although I’m not sure of the legality of that. Still, there’s no denying that this is a bustling market and…

that has nothing to do with me.

State of the Lithuanian scanlation scene

Maybe you’ve already deduced the reason for my absolute domination over the scanlation scene, maybe not, but here’s the first table, except the percentages have been replaced by chapters:

If you don’t know how much is one chapter, it’s usually 20-30 pages. Or about 5 minutes of reading time.

In other words, you could read the entirety of all manga produced by the Lithuanian scanlation scene in about… 5 hours?

Yeah. That’s not a lot. That’s like 5% of One Piece. Most of the chapters scanlated not by me seem to be just random people trying this stuff out, translating a chapter or 2 and then quitting. I can’t blame them; it’s not the most exciting job and it’s definitely not easy. For me a chapter could range from 2 hours of light work to an entire day of cleaning, drawing, translating and typesetting.

And I suck at drawing!

I guess I should start with the very first manga I scanlated.

Among Us

Yeah, there’s an Among Us manga. Go read it in Lithuanian.

From the moment I found out about the existence of this masterpiece, I knew I’d have to translate it. It was a prospect too tempting and too funny to ignore. And so I did!

You don’t have to read it very closely to notice that the translation is quite… liberal in its interpretation of the original story. That’s not to say it’s worse – it’s actually the opposite. I’d hate to spoil any of the gags, but in my opinion it’s very funny even now and a remarkable upgrade over the original.

In retrospect, I think the quality of the scanlation itself is fantastic, especially considering that it was my first ever attempt. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the translation itself is incredibly entertaining and the typesetting is probably better than any of the remaining 25 chapters translated not by me. Maybe the only gripe could be my mediocre cleaning, but that’s about it.

Now I’m kinda sad not all of my translations were as humorous as this, as it was very fun to look back on, but oh well…

Smetonos komiksai

Before we continue, you may have noticed an awfully pale mustachioed fella making a cameo on both the cover of this post and on the cover for the Among Us scanlation.

Well that guy is a prominent Lithuanian historical figure, glorified by some, hated by others – Antanas Smetona.

He was an “authoritarian president” (quoting Wikipedia here) of inter-war Lithuania for 14 years. During that time he did a lot of good things and a lot of… dictator things. In Lithuanian textbooks you’ll find his rule cutely nicknamed the “Velvet dictatorship” and that reflects the general opinion of him quite well. Most people are quite happy to gloss over the not so fun stuff the title implies and instead reminisce about the time as the last flare of a free Lithuania before succumbing to Soviet rule.

The “not so fun stuff” being: Media censorship, political oppression (especially against communists), “humane” labor camps and general violence.

Now, I’m not going to defend any of that. However as dictators go…? That’s pretty milquetoast. Especially when you consider the oppression Lithuania endured under the russian Tsars’ and would continue to endure soon after under the “dictatorship of the proletariat” it’s quite understandable why most people like him.

Now.

“Why is he the logo of a scanlation group?” I hear you asking…

Well the thing is, he has achieved a certain “meme” status over the years and it’s certainly not uncommon to see his face appear in Lithuanian meme subreddits and facebook groups. As well as that, he has a kvass brand named after him (yummy) and his name is village slang for sour cream.

So yeah. I chose him as the avatar for my great scanlation group because it was kinda funny. And it was very funny.

I was beginning to scanlate my second manga and…

The Music of Marie

And it didn’t go too well.

And I know why.

My problem

There was a problem that had been born from a combination of both my ambition and laziness.

My problem was that after scanlating Among Us my wish was no longer just to scanlate a specific manga, but to scanlate A manga. I really wanted to translate an entire manga from start to finish. Knowing myself, however, I decided not to raise the bar too high and instead of choosing which manga I’d scanlate based on weak ass baby shit such as “how much I enjoyed it”, I decided to look for manga that I could complete without much risk of abandoning the project.

That meant the manga had to be short. Very short. The longest manga I scanlated was The Horizon and it was only 3 volumes.

The problem was that there simply were not that many manga that:

1. had more than 1 chapter (was not a oneshot),
2. had less than ~30 chapters,
3. and had a cover that looked interesting to me.

Just by filtering through these 3 criteria, I managed to dilute the possible pool of manga to scanlate to under 10. The weird result of this choice was that all of the manga that I will mention from now on I had decided to scanlate before I had even read them.

That sounds like a bad idea, right? It’s like remembering not to judge a book by its cover and then doing the exact opposite.

But honestly?

I don’t think that that was that bad of an idea. Knowing your limits is a good thing and that may be part of the reason I didn’t quit after doing only a couple of chapters. Afterall it’s much easier to give up when you don’t see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

The scanlation process

After all that, I doubt it will surprise you to hear that I began scanlating the first chapter without having even finished reading the manga. But what’s the problem? I knew I’d like it from the cover alone after all.

Wait… So, was it secretly a really shitty piece of media that had tricked my with a nice cover? (would not be the first time)

Surprisingly, no!

Having read it, I actually quite like it! It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it has nice art and good atmosphere, which by itself is most of the reason one would read one manga over another (sorry weebs, manga ain’t exactly known for its tear-wrenching writing).

The problem is that it was just kinda hard to scanlate. Whereas with other manga sometimes I could scanlate a chapter a day, I think The Music of Marie’s chapter took almost a week. It was just tricky in every way.

There was a lot of text over images, which meant I’d have to do a lot of redrawing (which is a thing I suck at) and a lot of annoying cleaning. The text itself caused problems too – I remember the translation process going much slower than for Among Us and the same was true for the typesetting. Even getting high quality raw images was a challenge. Pretty much every step of the pipeline was more difficult.

The final nail in the coffin was the length of each chapter. They were all double the length of a normal chapter and averaged at around 35 pages. That inherently doubled the turnaround time for each chapter and the dopamine rush that comes with it.

That’s why there’s only one chapter translated on MangaDex.

Admittedly, the second chapter is laying somewhere on my hard drive and from the looks of it is mostly finished, but I really don’t have the push to review it and upload it, so I won’t.

If you want, you can read the first chapter here

Bibliomania

And we’re so so back!!! It’s amazing. Read it here.

I’m really happy with how this scanlation turned out. It’s funny, it’s mostly without errors (there are a couple, but I can live with that), it looks very good (except for one page I gave up on) and is much longer than anything I had done before.

It’s 12 chapters and was by far the biggest time investment at the time.

Having just reread it, it’s really fun to see how much effort was actually put into the jokes, often even changing the meaning of the original text to something that is less repetitive and more entertaining. Also, the typesetting (again, excluding that one page I gave up on) was generally very good and high effort, including masking text behind foreground objects, text effects and pretty good cleaning.

It’s almost a shame I have so little to say about it, because it’s just so good. Go read it.

Judging by MangaDex chapter release it took me about two months to scanlate it; however I was releasing one chapter a week and had a pretty large backlog, so I think it only took from a couple of weeks to a month.

The Horizon

This was the final manga I scanlated before abandoning the project. It was also an escalation in scope as it was a (staggering) 3 volumes in length. And again, I’m really happy with it.

This was also the first and only manga I created a trailer for, so that’s pretty cool.

The process

It was my first time translating not a manga, but a manhwa. Normally that would imply an entirely different format, as most manhwa are vertical instead of horizontal and, instead of containing pages, manhwa chapters are pretty much just a very long image that you scroll through. It’s like if manga was tiktok-ified.

While such a format is generally much nicer to read on phones, it’s also annoying to edit. As having a 720 by 55420 pixel image is generally considered suboptimal, manhwa is split into parts to be lazily loaded by the user, which means that as a scanlator I have to rejoin them, which does force my editor to cope with such insane resolutions.

Good news is: none of this mattered to me!

Yes, it just so happened that this manhwa was pretty normal and had regular pages. To be entirely honest I only noticed that after translating a couple of chapters, because I had just assumed otherwise, but it did make the process much easier.

Speaking of the process:

This was also the time I was forced to begin thinking of how to optimise the workflow of scanlation. The Horizon was longer than all the manga I had previously translated combined and I was beginning to notice some things. As a sucker for FOSS, I was determined to use GIMP, but after using it for a bit I began to reach a couple of limitations:

The first problem was a lack of a very simple feature – generative fill. As far as I know, GIMP still doesn’t have this even now, so I had to look for plugins to fill in the gap. This feature is incredibly useful when the text is placed against a simple background that is not exactly plain and The Horizon specifically had a lot of text placed above brown noise. At first I tried to use the heal brush, but I quickly found out it would be too much work and began to look for less labor intensive options.

The other, even bigger problem was the export pipeline. Until now my pipeline had been pretty simple. I load all pages into GIMP, I save them one by one as .xcf, I do my edits, I export them one by one as .jpg and then I run them through a jpg optimiser before finally publishing them on MangaDex. That had worked pretty well until now, however The Horizon was the first manga I translated that often had over 50 pages per chapter. That meant that even before beginning to translate I had to waste often over 10 minutes just repeating a couple of button chords merely to ensure my progress would be saved. Add the same amount of time for export and it was becoming very annoying.

Fortunately, I found a script to solve this!

Unfortunately, it only addressed the export part.

That meant that I had to write my own script, so I did. Granted, it’s very simple, however I did have to learn python and how to create plugins for GIMP specifically, so it was a bit of a chore.

Still, those two quality of life improvements allowed me to work much faster. Again, It’s difficult to estimate the time this scanlation took by reading the MangaDex timestamps, however according to the image creation metadata it seems like it took about a month of work and that wouldn’t have been possible without this new and improved workflow. I mean physically it would have been possible, I just would have gone insane.

You can’t read it

Yeah. I can’t give you a link as it’s unavailable. If you were wondering what that table at the beginning of the post was talking about, this is it.

What makes MangaDex such a pillar of the scanlation community, what has allowed them to stay afloat while hundreds of manga piracy sites drowned around them is that they’re not a piracy site! I know, technically they may be distributing copyrighted material, but they’re incredibly responsive to publisher complaints and pull any manga when asked. Honestly, I think that’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, one of the manga that has been delisted is The Horizon.

I only found that out recently and I was ready to be outraged. All the chapters had been deleted, leaving only superficial metadata as clues to their existence.

However, I remembered I had made backups, so it’s fine. I’m happy. Remember, people. If there’s anything I want you to take from this blog post is make backups. Always make backups.

The scanlation

As there’s no link I can share with you, I can only describe what the end product looked like.

It was good. Certainly a happy ending to my scanlator’s journey.

I, however, could feel that I was getting a bit tired of all this. The Horizon was an exercise not so much in quality as in quantity. Just kinda boring to work on. Whereas before I would roll my eyes after seeing that a page would need redrawing, now I would be actively yearning for that challenge.

Most of the time if a page needed cleaning, it was because the background was noisy, which is the most annoying type of dirt to clean. It’s hard to match the noise exactly and it does need to be all but perfect to look good to the reader. At the same time it’s completely unfulfilling for me to do as it’s literally just noise.

Same with text. It was either very simple, or a huge amount of exposition I could not skip over. As well as that, due to the tone of the comic, I couldn’t really add any jokes, which had been a pretty big intrinsic motivation for me until then.

The typesetting was trivial too.

I know I sound sad right now, but I am genuinely very happy with the result. It’s different, it’s not funny and it was not as much fun to make, but at the end of the day, it’s still pretty good.

Shame it’s likely to spend the rest of its days locked up in my home cloud server.

THE END

I did not expect I would write this much about a quirky little thing I did as a bored teenager in high school, but I’m pretty happy with it.

I hadn’t had any experience doing anything like it, and I haven’t had any since. It’s the kind of fun side-quest that I feel everyone should experience.

Not for the result, but for the process.

And never forget to backup your data.