How to Start a Scanlation Group That Actually Ships

Technically you can start a scanlation group with two people: one translates, one typesets. Most two-person groups stop by month three. The reason is rarely skill — it is that the workflow lives in someone's head instead of somewhere everyone can see it.

How many people do you need?

Effort per chapter depends on the format:

Format	Effort per chapter	Comfortable team
Webtoon (colour, long strip)	3–6 hours	4–5 people
Manga (B&W, 18–20 pages)	2–4 hours	3–4 people
Manhwa (heavy SFX, redraw)	5–9 hours	5–6 people

These are not "people working simultaneously" — they are the capacity needed to release one chapter a week. One person can do everything. What is not sustainable is that person being alone.

Which roles are actually essential?

Not every step in the classic eight-step chain needs its own person. The non-negotiable three:

1. Translator — moves the text into the target language.
2. Typesetter — places that text back onto the art.
3. Quality checker (QC) — reads the finished chapter before release.

Everything else splits off as the group grows: a cleaner removes the original text, a proofreader smooths the translation, a redrawer / editor handles effects and reconstruction, a RAW provider sources the chapter.

The rule for splitting: if a step is repeatedly the bottleneck, it has earned its own person. Splitting early has a cost too — in a five-person chain, one person disappearing stops everything.

Getting to chapter one

1. Pick the series. An untranslated, ongoing series looks appealing but carries two risks: colliding with another group, and losing your source. For a first project, a completed 20–40 chapter series is a better teacher.

2. Solve the RAW pipeline first. Sourcing chapters stalls more groups than translation does. Who finds them, from where, at what resolution — decide before chapter one.

3. Start the glossary on day one. Character names, honorifics, technique names. By chapter five someone will ask "how did we write this before?" There should be a place to look.

4. Ship one chapter end to end. Starting five chapters in parallel hides where you are slow. The first chapter is a measurement, not a masterpiece.

5. Measure, then grow. How many days did it take? Which step did it sit in? Only answer those before adding people.

Why groups fall apart

Three recurring patterns:

• Invisible workload. One person is doing three times the work and nobody sees it — including them, because there is no number. One day they quietly leave.
• Nobody knows whose turn it is. "Did this go to typesetting?" gets lost in chat history. A chapter waits on one person's desktop while everyone assumes it is moving.
• The founder is a single point of failure. If everything routes through one person, a two-week absence stops the group.

All three share a cause: status lives in conversation instead of in a shared place. A workflow that lives in chat messages scrolls away.

When does tooling become a real problem?

For the first two or three chapters, a chat channel and a shared folder are enough. Three symptoms say otherwise:

• You answer "where is chapter X?" more than once a week,
• Nobody can say when a chapter will be delivered,
• A new member is still asking what to do in week two.

We compare the usual options in the comparisons section.

Next

Once the group exists, the question becomes the workflow itself. The scanlation workflow, explained walks through all eight steps.