I have a long history of using machine translation to help me read Japanese news stories, talk to fan bases online, and sometimes even play games. However, when you don’t know the original language, it’s hard to understand what impact these tools may have on how we interact with the Japanese language.
I talked with Cargodin, a fan translator on games like Napple Tale and Blue Legend of Water, about how she views the English audience’s relationship with the Japanese language as changing over the years.