How to translate a webtoon into English, step by step

A webtoon is drawn to be scrolled, not turned. An episode is one tall strip, usually in full colour, with panels stacked top to bottom and empty bands (gutters) between them. The pacing lives in that space: a long gap before a reveal is part of the joke or the shock.

That changes the job in three ways:

• The lettering sits on colour, often over gradients, glows and effects, so cleaning it off takes more care than on a black-and-white page.
• Bubbles are sized for a phone screen. English that is a little too long has nowhere to go, and text set too small is unreadable on the device the episode is made for.
• The strip is too tall to work on in one piece in most editors, so it has to be cut into parts and joined again without a seam showing.

Translate work you created, work you are licensed to localise, or work whose rights holder has said yes. A translation is a derivative work: publishing one without permission is infringement even when it is free and credited. Creators on webtoon platforms are often glad to be asked, and a written yes protects you both.

Get the highest-resolution files you can. Every later step (reading small text, cleaning, lettering) is easier on the original export than on a compressed screenshot.

Read the episode end to end before translating anything. A line at the top often only makes sense once you have seen the panel at the bottom, and a pronoun is only safe once you know who is speaking.

Write down, as you go:

• Every character's name, spelled one way, and their gender where the story shows it.
• Who calls whom what: a younger brother's hyung, a junior's sunbae, a nickname used only when someone is angry. See Korean honorifics in manhwa.
• Invented terms, places, skills and ranks, each with the English you will use for it.

This list is the most valuable thing you make. Keep it for the next episode: a name that changes spelling at episode 30 is the mistake readers notice first.

Work top to bottom, bubble by bubble, with the panel in front of you rather than a list of lines. A reply should read as a reply to the bubble above it, and a sentence that runs across two bubbles should still read as one sentence.

Aim for English about as long as the space allows. Korean and Chinese pack a lot into few characters, so a literal English line is often far longer than its bubble. Say what the character means, in the voice they have, in the room you have.

Cleaning (redrawing, in scanlation terms) means removing the original text and restoring whatever was under it. Inside a white bubble that is a fill. Over colour art it means painting back the gradient, the hair or the background the letters covered.

Change nothing else. A cleaned strip should match the original pixel for pixel everywhere outside the lettering.

Set each line centred in its bubble, at a size that stays readable when the strip is shown at phone width. Keep one size for ordinary dialogue across the episode, shrink only where a bubble truly cannot hold the line, and give shouting, whispers and narration their own consistent treatment.

Where two bubbles are joined, split the English so each part sits in its own lobe, in reading order. Text that sits on the art without a bubble is lettered in place with an outline, not covered with a box. More in manga typesetting.

Sound effects are drawn as part of the art, often in colour and in perspective. You can leave them, add a small English caption beside them, or redraw them in English. Redrawing looks best and costs the most, and it is the step most likely to damage the art. The trade-offs are in how to translate manga sound effects.

Join the parts back into one strip and scroll it on a phone, at the width readers use. Look for seams where parts meet, text that is too small or touches a bubble's edge, a name spelled two ways, and a line that reads as a reply to the wrong bubble. Then read it once more for the story alone.

Panelift does these steps for you on Korean, Chinese and Japanese webtoons, into English. Upload the strip, a ZIP or the episode's link. A tall strip is cut at the gutters between panels (overlapping only where there is no gutter), every bubble is read with the whole episode in view, the lettering is erased and the art painted back, the English is lettered into each bubble, and the strip is stitched back together. A pixel check confirms nothing outside the lettering changed.

Names, genders, forms of address and terms are kept per series, so the next episode uses the same English. You can reword any line in the page editor, and only that bubble is lettered again. New accounts start with free credits, and what a chapter costs is on its own page.