(For posterity, this is being written on Nov 23rd 2025. If anyone who was part of or remembers any events better than I do, feel free to drop a comment below and I will update this as necessary.)

Where to even begin.

I guess I’ll start with saying thank you to everyone reading Legend and reading this post. For any readers who started around the time I started translating, I hope the last 10 years have been well for you. The world has changed in many ways in the past decade, but many things are still the same, like me working on Legend.

A decade ago I was in my second year of university, I’ve since graduated, worked for a couple of years, and then gone back to do a PhD, which I am now in the final year of. In all that time, Legend has been a bit of a constant for me, rain or shine a chapter will come out on Sunday, and eventually Monday as well after I started doing two chapters a week. The story of how I got started with translating Legend needs to go a few years further back in time though. It is important to note that a lot of things I’ve written here are based on my memory from as far back as 15 years ago, so some specifics might be off with regards to what actually happened at the time and when something might have happened.

I didn’t have much access to things like anime and manga before senior high school, so year 10-11 was my first interaction with it. And, of all the possible anime I could have started watching as a teen in 2011-2012, my first anime was Infinite Stratos. Infinite Stratos, for those who don’t know it, was Harem/Rom-Com/Mecha series that aired in 2011 and I greatly enjoyed watching it. Infinite Stratos was then followed up by many other anime series during my time in high school, notably One Piece, a lot of One Piece, but Infinite Stratos stuck with me as a series I wanted to watch more of. Unfortunately for me, season 1 was only 13 episodes and season 2 wouldn’t come out until 2013, so one day, as I was searching up things about Infinite Stratos, I found out that it was actually an anime adaptation of a light novel series by the same name.

My journey with hobbyist/unofficial translations doesn’t start with web novels, but actually light novels. In fact, web novel translation in general started with light novel translations. Back in 2012, web novel translation was basically an untouched scene. Only light novels saw translation and there were no official English publishers, like there are nowadays. Almost all translations that I knew of at the time could be found a single site, Baka-Tsuki. Founded in 2006, Baka-Tsuki not only hosted English translations of light novels, but also translations to other languages that anyone might be working on. It basically worked on the basis that someone would put their name down to translate a given chapter of a given volume of a light novel and that would be it. Unlike current webnovel translation, where chapters often come out on a daily or weekly basis, light novel translation was done when it was done, usually on the scale of months depending on who was working on it. There were and are still other conventions in place on the site, but that was generally it. While there were no real tests for translator ability at the time, machine translations were greatly frowned upon and while I don’t recall the specifics, might not have been permitted on the site at the time. In addition to all that,  machine translation tech at the time was also just not that good. It was there on Baka-Tsuki that I was introduced to the world of light novels.

Here I would like to shout out a few people, two of which I have never talked with at all, but enjoyed their work greatly. Js06, The Robot, The Machine, who has basically single handedly translated all 50 or so volumes of Toaru Majutsu no Index up until now, which I will note were basically double the length of most other light novel volumes at the time for whatever reason. Zzhk, who worked on Campione! and High School DxD, among other works, all series I enjoyed reading for……reasons. And lastly, Onizuka-GTO, who was an admin on the site among other things and the only one I have talked with as part of the only Baka-Tsuki project I worked on that didn’t go very far, more details later.

So, for the next two to three years, I was very much a consumer of light novels, but during this time there were already starting to be changes to the scene. The first big change was the subject of MTL, machine translation, starting with Madan no Ou to Vanadis. In late 2012, EnigmaticAxiom started working on volume 1 of Madan no Ou to Vanadis via machine assisted translation. This led to a discussion on the Baka-Tsuki forums iirc about whether MTL should be allowed on the site. It was a interesting discussion for the time due to several reasons. The first was regarding quality of translation. The concern was that while EnigmaticAxiom’s translation was for all intents and purposes fine, letting MTL into the scene in general could affect the quality of later translations. It should be known at the time that such translation work was very much hobbyist contribution. There was no money involved whatsoever, both in the form of paid work or donations. EnigmaticAxiom’s translations were eventually accepted on the condition that they would be listed as previews and would be replaced should a proper translation be done at a later point in time. It’s interesting to look back at that discussion now as the points given were quite valid and have since come to pass. Of note, EnigmaticAxiom’s translations of the first few volumes of Madan no Ou to Vanadis still stand as the current available fan translation of the light novel series.

The next big things to happen, for both me and the translation scene, would be in 2014. In my case, I graduated from high school in 2013 and 2014 was my first year in university. 2014 would also be my first real personal interaction of sorts in the novel translation scene. As for the translation scene, 2014 would be when we would see the first introduction of webnovels to the wider translation scene, notably and famously, Mushoku Tensei and Coiling Dragon.

This is around the time that my recollection gets a little fuzzy due to everything going on at the time. A few things I will note at the time are that Novel Updates didn’t exist, the way people got notified of updates to various light novel translations was either by visiting the Baka-Tsuki page directly, or someone posting updates on either the r/LightNovels or r/LightNovelTranslations subreddits, don’t exactly remember which but r/LightNovelTranslations has since been banned, so it’s hard to confirm without seeing when it was first created. Novel Updates was only created after Mangaupdates announced that they would no longer track web novels on their releases. Another thing is that Chinese novel/web novel fan translation predates my knowledge of it by probably another 10 years, but this was around the time that I came into contact with it myself.

I don’t recall exactly how the whole Mushoku Tensei thing started, but long story short, Mushoku Tensei was a light novel that started as a web novel, as many light novels did. Of note, the light novels were basically just polished versions of the web novel and so the web novel basically followed the same story and I believe at the time was also ahead of the light novel publication in terms of content. It was still mostly innocuous at this point in time but would later become an entire mess of its own.

As for Coiling Dragon, this first showed up on the SPCNet forums, www.spcnet.tv, which unfortunately closed in July 2024. It was being translated by one RenWoXing, who would later go on to have a pretty big impact on the fan translation scene as a whole.

I’m rambling a bit at this point, but 2014 was also the year that Baka-Tsuki attempted to start up audio books of translated versions of the light novels on the site. I don’t recall exactly what led up to this being brought up, but I was one of the ones who signed up for making audio readings of light novels, so somewhere on the internet is a copy of me narrating the first few chapters of  the first volume of Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei. This was a project I worked on with Onizuka-GTO, who was both the admin for the project and the manager for the youtube channel, which still exists, but no longer has anything on it.

So, moving into 2015 a few things happened, one being the mess that was Mushoku Tensei. So as I previously mentioned, with Madan no Ou to Vanadis, the subject of machine assisted translation as a preview translation of sorts had been agreed to be allowed. In the case of Mushoku Tensei, this resulted in a large number of not great quality machine translations being uploaded. At around the same time, someone had the bright idea that maybe if they gave money to RWX, he could maybe translated a couple more chapters for them to read. RWX ran with it and soon a bunch of people were throwing money at him to hurry up the translations of what was at the time a very different story experience to Japanese light novels and web novels. This led to the creation of the Wuxia World website which still hosts a number of Chinese web novel translations.

On a whole, these events resulted in people realising three things, web novels were much easier to access online than light novels, machine translation wasn’t good but many people would accept trash just to read ahead, and that you could make money from this. This led to an explosion of people creating their own websites to translate whatever they could get their hands on. Baka-Tsuki pretty much wanted nothing to do with it, in addition to the fact that they didn’t accept money anyway, and web novels pretty much split off from the site entirely. There were also several big debates about whether light novels and web novels could even be considered the same thing, which led to the creation of the r/NovelTranslations subreddit, which would end up becoming the main place to post and discuss fan translations until the eventual formation of NovelUpdates.

With the explosion of sites with poor quality translations everywhere, it also led to inevitable conflicts between different parties. On Baka-Tsuki, you signed up for what you wanted to do and that was it, it wouldn’t be taken away from you unless you took your name off it. It was very much an honour based system which people followed. The Wild West of web novels translations was a different matter entirely, there where many series which had multiple machine translated versions on different sites at any given time, each fighting over who would be the one to post chapter translations as well as make any potential money off it. This was usually to the detriment of readers and the novel, as it ultimately led to significant amounts of poorly translated chapters that no one really wanted to go back and properly update, Konjiki no Wordmaster was one such victim.

This was also around the time the first big Korean novel to hit the scene, Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, was having a bunch of issues with it’s translation, it mostly switched to machine translation with a group of 20+ people working on it together on a line by line basis, supposedly checked by someone who knew Korean.

But, as with many things, as many sites appeared, all doing translation, some of the better translators, not machine translators, started to group together in order to set up bigger sites, similar to how manga scanlation teams work, except each working on their own series. Not many of those sites have survived the years, but a few off the top of my head were Wuxia World, Gravity Tales, Radiant Translations, and Moon Bunny Cafe. I won’t go too much into the details of what happened to those sites in the end, but GodTaoistofPatience did a good write up about it here.

My personal entry into the translation scene was around this time, I had previously been part of the super scuffed team working on Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, but at some point I decided to look for something I enjoyed reading. One series I was reading at the time was Magicraft Meister, translated by one Natsulus at the time. They had put out a post on one chapter asking if anyone was interested in helping out with translating the series and I, along with one other person, signed up for it. I worked on it for about 2-3 months but ultimately, having three people working on a single series, trading and leapfrogging chapters was just logistically rough. At this point I decided to see if I could find a series to work on myself, one that no one else was working on and one with enough chapters that I could expect to work on it for a while without it ending.

Enter Legend.

I found Legend while browsing web novels on Syosetu and innocent me at the time looked at the number of chapters, saw ~800 or so, and thought, that doesn’t seem too bad. I created a free wordpress website, set everything up, translated a few chapters to see how hard it was, and then posted the first chapter on Nov 17th 2015. This being the wild west of web novel translations at the time, I actually somehow started translating and posting chapters of Legend just a few days after someone else picked up the series as well. I had a quick chat with them, asking if they were interested in working on it together, but they decided to cede it to me in the end. I think their site was called 87 Translations or something, but regardless, they definitely dodged a bullet.

But, that was how I got started with Legend. With university studies and all during that time, I basically put out only a single chapter translation a week, which was close to the norm for the time for people who didn’t take donations for bonus chapters. I will admit, as a very poor soul at the time, I was tempted to start accepting donations as well, but a few things ultimately stopped me from doing so. The first was, practically speaking, I didn’t have the time to work on more chapters even if I was given money. The second was that I didn’t believe my translation was good enough to be paid to do more of it, something I still stand by to this day. I can provide a good English output, but I cannot vouch for the accuracy of my translations as I am not someone who has studied or is fluent at speaking or reading Japanese.

I eventually caved in on one point though and that was getting paid to put advertisements up. As part of this, I joined the Moon Bunny Cafe group, which unlike some of the other groups I mentioned previously, was more a collection of translators posting on a single site for exposure rather than managed all together. I stuck with Moon Bunny Cafe for about 3 years from 2016 to 2019, posting on both their site and my own before deciding to just pay for my own hosting around 2020, which is what this site is now. I continued to get ad revenue until 2022, at which point my Google AdSense account got banned for reasons I still don’t know. Looking back, this was a good learning experience for me in many ways. Ultimately, while I appreciated the money I made during those years, it also caused me a lot of stress that I could have done without. Looking at the revenue each month, worried if it decreased, checking the number of views, these were all things I didn’t start translating Legend for.

Over the years since, I’ve managed to translate several more shorter web novels such as The Dutch Slope’s Western Cafe, 1234th Year of the Galactic Era – The Museum of Rare Weapons, and That Time I got Reincarnated into Google Spreadsheets. All with significant amounts of procrastination. I also started translating two chapter of Legend a week, rather than just the one. This had allowed me to reach 824 translated chapters after 10 years, which only puts me 3800 chapters behind the author or so. As I found out a bit too late, the author of Legend writes a chapter a day, and has done so for the past 12 years, I have literally only just caught up to the number of chapters that the author had written when I started 10 years ago……this is just making me incredibly sad.

Honestly, there is a lot more I could write about that I haven’t, the rise of aggregator sites, the stepping in of the Japanese and Chinese publishers, the introduction of English publishers, publication of original English web novels, the Translators’ Corner discord server that was created in 2016 by Kookie and will reach it’s own 10 year anniversary in January, the series that I have wanted to translate but just never got around to, and so much more.

However, this write up is already messy as it is, so I’ll leave all that to another time. Looking towards the future, what can I say? I’ll probably keep on working on Legend for the foreseeable future. It’s become such a big part of my weekly routine at this point. I have to look into potentially doing my own hosting though, because my current hosting isn’t cheap. Not that it’s expensive either, but as I’m not making any money from this, I should probably look to cheaper options. In a couple of months, I will have finished my PhD and will be a Doctor of Computer Science and Information Technology, who knows what lies beyond then. Part of me hopes Legend will get an anime and I’ll get DMCA’d or something, that way I would have a legit reason to stop and just read on my own. Machine translation has gotten a lot better over the years, and Legend was pretty readable even back 10 years ago via Google Translate. Maybe one day I’ll get to catch up to what the author has written for Rei in the 10 years since I started.