Fan translators are ... well, fans. That, and the average anime does not reach the deep and complex depths of literary Japanese, which works on a language level

Fan translators are ... well, fans. That, and the average anime does not reach the deep and complex depths of literary Japanese, which works on a language level, but adds strata of common cultural understanding that's quite difficult to get right when you aren't intimately entangled in both cultures. Imagine trying to translate even mundane idioms like "Boris Johnson is like a well-greased pig", meaning "offers no angle of attack" to German, which is a related language, but whose people have no concepts of greasing up live pigs and making people hunt them for fun or as a prank - it's just not something we do. (I'm bringing that example here because some English journalist tried to use the direct translation in a recent interview). Now imagine doing for complete literary works from cultures which developed completely separate from each other for aeons. Translating high culture badly is not something we should encourage.