I could spend hours replying to this. Instead, I'll keep it as short as I can.
Xanadu II and Anearth Fantasy Stories, and other projects too, are starved for hackers above all. I only translate Japanese to English. By the way, Xanadu II's English script is totally done, but the project is in limbo waiting for someone to hack that script into the game. I love Esperknight, the guy who has been the hacker so far, but his output volume isn't exactly high, and he seems to be stuck on a technical hangup.
Translation patches are basically the product of two-man hacker/translator teams. I have the endurance to work on this stuff for long hours every week, which is what it takes, but I need someone who can volley my efforts back at me. That's what makes the difference in motivation for me.
Money just isn't something I've spent time thinking about. As long as someone next to me is working hard and we're achieving real results together, that's all I need. That and a good game, of course, but there are a lot of those.
Fortune has smiled upon me recently and sent a sublime programmer my way, and together, we are about to release a translation Zeroigar on the PC-FX. I never dreamed it would look this good. I think you guys will love it.
After that, who knows what will happen...
I'm not going to lie: If I could do this work legitimately for a living, I would. However, achieving true legitimacy is incredibly difficult. I can't imagine it happening without the blessing of the people who hold the license of the original game. Supposing that they can even be tracked down, they're probably a bunch of boring old suits who would either demand impossible terms or would simply say "no".
Translations of any written work do not qualify as original works themselves; permission must be obtained from the source's author. So even free translation projects are well in the legal grey area.
Setting aside whether its really ethical to make money off of someone else's work like that, though, there's also the uncomfortable fact that you risk attracting some dubious bedfellows. I'm speaking, of course, about repro dealers. There's no question that what they do is illegal. As long as we release translation patches for free, we can thumb our noses at them (and will). But should we start accepting money for our work, it would be that much more difficult to distinguish what we do from what they do. At the very least, we would have to make a constant fuss about about only applying the patches to backups of legitimately acquired games.
My further thoughts on repros can be found here.
Certainly, if any license holder decided to threaten me with a lawsuit, you can bet that I would fold faster than Superman on laundry day. You can also be sure that the romhacking community, which has been making free translation patches for 20 years or so now, would react with hostility to someone trying to make large amounts of money from patches. It makes sense: that draws the Zeus-like giant corporations a little nearer to raining legal lightning bolts down on all of them.
Then there's the final issue: Could two people really make a decent living creating translation patches? Even if we were working full time, getting more than three translation patches done per year would not be easy. Four months salary for two professionals is a lot. A few hundred people giving an average $20 each isn't going to cut it. You'd need either more people or more money per person, and I'm not sure we could really muster that.
I appreciate it when people offer to show their gratitude by making donations, but all in all, I'm afraid that money would just poison the well.
