With Japanese, it's not so much the words that get you in games. They use a simple subset of kanji, most of them, and a good kanji dictionary goes a long way. No, it's that Japanese is just as much a grammatical mess as English is. There are little exceptions and special forms and sayings all over the place, and mastering those is a life task for those not raised bilingual.
This is going off topic, but I've got two private students who were were raised here in Japan with an American father who deliberately only ever spoke English to them. I also dated a half-Kiwi girl for a while, met her two sisters, and saw her mother also speaking only English to them. As someone who has studied and struggled with Japanese, I used to be insanely jealous of people raised in bilingual environments, but not anymore. After meeting these people and understanding their situations, it's clear that it takes basically the same amount of work for a child to learn a second language as an adult. The only major difference, IMO, is that it's easier to force a child into a situation where they simply HAVE to use the other language.
As of yet, I have met precisely one truly bilingual person who is half-Japanese, and he achieved this mostly by going to school for long periods in both England and Japan. Everybody else is actually worse off than me as a serious adult learner. I love my two half-Japanese students to death, but I never would have expected that even they have trouble with plurals, articles (a/the), and basic verb conjugations just like regular Japanese people do.
Seasoned PCE dev people != translation hackers
Just because people are qualified/capable of doing translation hacking, doesn't automatically give them the drive to do it. Translation hacking is often tedious, repetitive, mentally exhausting, and/or just plain boring for people that know how to do more than just hacking. It might be fun the first project/time around... being a new challenge and all. But it gets old fast. The no so fun part in testing/debugging with usual headaches, hair pulling, etc. You're hacking your own routines into the game, hoping it doesn't break any sort of compatibility with other in game functions (unrelated stuff that never the less gets effected in one way or another. It's not like you have the whole game disassembled and commented/figured out. Only key/small parts). It could be something as simple as your replacement hook routines taking too much time, throwing timing out that usually causes graphic glitches but sometimes straight lockups.
This, I fear, is where the LOX2 translation is held up at the moment. Esperknight, who has a 1-year-old son to help look after when he's not at work, is going to need real time to properly deal with all the difficulties of storing the script and getting it to display. I've got faith in him, though.
