Many people want to translate manga but there is not much information on how to start translating manga. This series looks at different aspects of translating manga for beginners, with the aim of helping you be a great manga translation and improve the overall quality of manga translation online.
Translating Manga for Beginners
Part 1: Resources
Part 2: Translating SFX (Sound Effects)
Part 3: Good Manga Translation
Part 4: Translating Accents
Part 5: Formatting Translations in Word Files
Manga Helpers Community
This is a great website for people interested in manga, anime, light novels, and visual novels. But more importantly, people interested in translating and scanlating manga.
This website is a little difficult to navigate but it has a lot of useful resources for translating manga. It’s mostly forum run where you’re able to discuss translations, ask questions, and there’s a translators academy and classroom with advice for translating manga. This website if for all levels of Japanese ability.
It’s also great if you’re a beginner translator because you can add your translations and request for people to proof-read them.
There is also forum space where scanlators are always looking for translators, working with them is a great way to practice your translating. (It’s important to find a group you enjoy working with and a manga you enjoy translating. No point doing it if you don’t find it fun).
The Jade Network (SFX Dictionary)
The Jade Network is a fantastic SFX dictionary for translating sound effects you find in manga.
Jisho.org
A Japanese to English dictionary. has the useful feature of searching for kanji by radical.
Baka-Updates Manga
A resource website that lists pretty much every manga in existence. Including the various titles they go by, the number of volumes published, and which groups are scanlating them.
It’s also a great place to see what’s popular as people rate manga and discuss them in the forums.
This site isn’t that useful for the manga translation process, it’s mostly useful for discussing manga with other people.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is my number one tool when translating manga. Often you need to research stuff for the manga you’re translating and using wikipedia in both Japanese and English can help when you come to difficult sections.
For example, I’m translating a manga that discusses board games, the Japanese wikipedia page has a list of all the games used in the manga, while the English wikipedia page has the English explanations of all the games.
Where to Get RAWs
You can’t translate manga without RAWs, scanned versions of the manga in the original Japanese. You can buy the books off of amazon.jp, or work with scanlation groups who will have RAWs available for you.
You may have to buy RAW manga from certain websites if you can’t find it for free in other locations.
If you’re after a particular manga RAW and don’t want to buy the book or work with a scanlation group you can get them a number of ways.
- Ask people on Baka-Updates or Manga Helpers forums if they have a particular RAW or where you can get it.
- Raw Manga Land
- Sen Manga
- Raw Hunters
- Dl.Zip
- Square Enix (buy e-books, but often not expensive)
- E-book Japan (buy e-books, but often not expensive)
- Amazon.jp