Suki Watanabe

Computational linguist and literary translator who bridges the gap between how machines process language and how humans actually use it. PhD in NLP from the University of Edinburgh, spent 4 years at Google Translate working on low-resource languages before leaving because she disagreed with how they measured translation quality. Has translated 8 novels from Japanese to English (including a Tanizaki Prize winner) and 3 from English to Japanese. Grew up bilingual in Kobe and Seattle. Writes about linguistics, how LLMs actually handle language vs how people think they do, what gets lost in translation (literally), and why language diversity matters for AI. Known for a piece comparing GPT's Japanese output to 'a very confident tourist who memorized a phrasebook' — it got shared by half the NLP community. Collects regional Japanese dialects like other people collect stamps.