tj_han, absolutely - getting together the best translated articles in an edited book or journal special issue would be a boon to the research in English. Strange that it hasn’t happened already (?) or more often because so many of the English-lang researchers like the panellists at this seminar and jpmeyer are effectively bilingual.

Though crappy papers aren’t the monopoly of anime studies and some of the worst books (e.g. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations) can still be hugely influential and on a lot of hapless students’ reading lists in other fields/disciplines.

If you realise most of the anime/Jap culture papers in English comes from the same old people. Then there are those crappy uni Jap departments who serve up useless and terribly written papers (see the Cosplay one by Thang Leng Leng fromNUS).