I promise not to pay you for it when it's complete. 
Well, that's the standard, default behavior of the public, so no worries... You're not ever gonna endanger it with such offers.
I think what spenoza said makes sense, if you could find a hacker to build all the tools to extract the script, insert it back in, along with a font hack, and a decent patching system, etc. you can worry about finding a translator later. Get the difficult programming/reverse engineering stuff out of the way. After that, then try to find a translator. They're more likely to do the translation for free as well; most that I met are very anti-profit and all into the fan credo ideology (as in, fanatics). Shimarisu (
majority translator of Ys IV) was the only exception who was caught on eBay selling Ys IV originals with a fully-patched CD-R to up the price.
Anyway, the main problem is all you did is make a post here and are essentially hoping for the best. You gotta be more of an activist for it than that. You need to market the offer in more places and also fire off emails/PMs to known hackers with a track record. EsperKnight came to mind, but SamIam spoke on that, but the next person off the top of my head is Bonknuts. He's an expert with the variable-width font hacks and could probably handle figuring out the text decompression code, etc. David Shadoff is another guy, as mentioned, but you probably couldn't tempt him, even with the full $600. He's been working on Cosmic Fantasy 1 for years, so it's an issue of time and since he does very well at his job as an IT consultant, $600 would be chump change to him not to mention the game in question has been on his list already!!
I would've taken you up on that $600 offer if I had seen it years ago AND if it was for a PC game though! I got good enough to hack most PC games over time, given all the knowledge, tools, etc. available on the Windows platform and my prior x86 assembly experience going into it. With NEC games for an old 8-bit console, there was no interactive debugger with the emulators when the Ys IV project began and you've got primitive hardware/software, so it was hard for someone like me to dive into it. You needed very exceptional talent like a Neill Corlett for that aspect and compression algorithms were never my thing either, so David Shadoff saved the day after Neill.
With PC games, it's much easier to track down the decompression code, rip it out, figure out how the parameters work and compile it in your own project with additional "C" written modules to use. You don't have to understand it and when it comes to recompression, you can hack the executable to bypass normal procedures of decompress and load, and skip it forward to the loading, so you leave your image or text replacements as plain files, without compression, etc. That's how I got it done with my PC Ys projects. Later games use standard ZLIB (Zip/unzip) though which is freely available for download and use, so you'd never have to learn how the algorithm works. Early games used custom algorithms, I had a hunch Ys I Complete uses something called LZO, but yeah, it was irrelevant to me in the end. You have much more control and options to bypass problems like this on a Windows PC game than with an old console game and its primitive hardware/instruction set, along with the lack of advanced tools (advanced disassemblers) to work with it, etc. You don't get to cheat...
(I hear these days that Mednafen has a decent debugger though, but I've never tried it.)
