My response to an e-mail

So I was talking with a o1man and he sent me a very thoughtful suggestion on how the translations can be more approachable for a general audience:

"I understand the catering to a geeky audience, leaving it to the person to educate themselves, however, it may also be good to follow a concept attributed to Stan Lee. He always said the "every comic book is someone's first", so it is with every form of geekdom. Just something to consider. BTW it was because of such idioms and wanting to understand them, that I began to study Japanese, not just the language but also about the culture."

My response was:

"I'm more of the philosophy that if people care about it, they can learn about it. Not knowing what "otaku" or "itadakimasu" means isn't a barrier to entry, I'm sure the overarching story will make sense to a complete layman. But it's a nice nod to our target audience that we keep certain terms as they are, because vocabulary is important. Language and culture are completely entwined in a way that sometimes you can't remove one without removing the other."

I just really like the last line since it captures how I feel about the language and probably explains why I translate some things the way I do.