User blog comment:Crimson and Darkness/Volume 24 discussion blog/@comment-31456106-20180117030536/@comment-2601:8C:601:5692:741B:1F19:CEC1:CF39-20180123154637

The translator orders the Japanese LN online and has it delivered. As they know the language, they then proceed to translate it. That's why the TLs take so long, they're not just copy & pasting into a machine translator and then doing some editing of the results. (Well, I believe that zxzxzx actually translates from the Chinese/Korean version (don't recall which) if I'm remembering correctly.) Photos are scans, obviously (they usually take up an entire LN page so it's not all that hard to scan them).