

Japanese here. There are specific editors often categorized as “アスキーアートエディタ” (Ascii Art Editor). They often come with libraries of existing AA to modify, and can display image with low opacity to “trace” image.
Large part of jp ascii art made/appeared in 90s to early 00s at underground forums like 2ch. Those editors were tailored for their speifics such as font family (MS-P Gothic) and size. The display/font system is different nowadays, but unlike “AA artist” in those times who is 100% comitted to make vertical line aligning pixel perfect most of people find those AA displays ok.
If you need translation for just getting facts and information for say math equation and its annotation translated, there’s little margin in variety, what you need is database - that’s mostly fine.
Pieces need translation are usually not like that. They have cultural context, pun, wordplay in rhymes, structural parallel, underlying tone, a lot of things only work in the language originally written. Translation is always a (nearly impossible) challenge for the translator to reconstruct all of them in target language.
I did game translation for a while. Translation is a field where AI hit first and honestly I’ve seen people lowering standards. The criteria of “good enough”, “passable” is not the same compared to pre-AI days, and will keep changing. I’m almost sure this trend is happening in every industry the same way, and “just translation” is a slippery slope.