Many translation hackers prefer to just "stare at the data" until it makes sense. Basically start with the obvious, look for
single-byte or
two-byte XORs (easily spotted by repeating patterns / long stretches of similar-looking bytes). Then after masking those away, start looking for dialogue in the data files... Basically cross your fingers while searching for a line of dialogue in the data files, hopefully encoded as Shift-JIS or UTF8. If you get lucky you'll find the text
in plain sight. And if you're even luckier, it turns out that it's easy to change the length of the dialogue line, otherwise the translation will have to be shorter than the original sentence. For this game in particular, the length is conveniently right next to the sentence itself (the pink-shaded value), but in other games it might be stored
in a table somewhere, complicating things a fair bit.
So all in all, it really depends on the game. Some are easier to translate than others, and you never know 'till you try!
Best of luck
