I was just wondering how feasible it would be for a group translation effort for some of the more popular hypnosis-themed eroge/visual novels out there. I know that Saimin Yuugi in particular is pretty popular.

I think many of us wondered about that when Saimin Yuugi first came out. Most eroges that are fan-translated are done so as a labor of love project. In our case, I don't think we have a group of people willing to spend the immense amount of time required to translate an entire game. Not to mention program a patch for it. Hiring a group seems difficult too. Mainly because I don't know if a group exists that would tackle an eroge. If so, we'd need to pay them whatever they asked, and I don't imagine any one person would be willing to foot the bill. We could try to find some way to allow people to donate to a fund to pay for the translation, but then it becomes a question of trust.

Short version: unfortunately, it's probably not likely. :(

Saimimasen, demo watashiwa nihonga hanishimasen :( :( :(

そーなのかー?

ここだれも日本語を話せない？！

Seriously, though, I barely read any Japanese, I just use Rikaichan to make it look like I can :/

I don't think any active posters here can; I'm interested to know how many lurkers do. I know there are some semi-anonymous translators around here.

You need, at minimum, somebody capable of ripping the game text and inserting the translated stuff, somebody who can edit game CGs featuring text, and a translator. Depending on the specifics of the game and the team working on it, you might need more or fewer people (a translator who can hack reasonably well, for instance, or a game that stores its text in a really easily edited manner). You DON'T want a ton of translators. The final product will end up flowing really oddly with several different writing styles unless you have a really great editor(s).

For instance, the Seinarukana translation team has a team of 1 translator (along with two who quit partway through), 3 editors, 2 graphics guys, and a coder. The Kara no Shoujo translation had 1 translator, 2 editors, 1 image editor, and a dedicated subtitler.

Paid/commissioned fan translations aren't really a thing. The closest I can think of was Aroduc's Kickstarter drive a couple weeks ago, which got shut down by the IP holders within a couple days.

So you probably can't put together a translation team from here, and commissioned translations are pretty unprecedented to my knowledge (and a legally pretty grey area). Your best hope is an existing translation team picking one of these games, which is... unlikely. Most of them are, so far as I know, nukige (mostly porn). Nukige, as a rule, don't get fan translated (because there's nothing really worth translating to most people).

Uh, one of the contributors to booru.org, who made the mass-uploader for example, has put out some VN hacking tools. They can be found here: http://vn.i-forge.net/tools/

I once fiddled with those, but only to extract something. I believe the real issue with translating a game is having someone on the team that knows japanese, the rest can be figured out with a bit of patience.

I think all the games mentioned on that page are nukige. Suppose those probably have simpler structures.

I'll admit I'm mostly familiar with the top end of the VN translating scene; the Seinarukana translation, for instance, is a professional-quality fan translation being sold to an official publisher. Moreover, it's a hugely complex game with actual gameplay and 2000 images that need to be hard subbed. Really should have considered the difference before I posted earlier.

If it's a relatively small game like we're talking, you could probably do it with 2~3 people. One translator, one or two people doing editing/hardsubbing/misc. coding (because something will ALWAYS break).

I know I personally would be fine with a pure script translation - not dealing with inserting the text into the game at all. I know of games where that kind of thing has been done.
But that just leads back to the problem of "we don't have anybody to translate stuff".