I did two years of Japanese in high school, which have me enough of a grounding in the language to start translating. Once you have a proper understanding of the grammer, translating just becomes a matter of looking up Kanji and learning the vocabulary and rearranging it until it’s not awkward to read. I do use Google Translate just as a way of looking up some individual words, in conjuction with a few dictionary tools I have. I’m a long way off actual reading comprehension (which would certainly speed things up a lot), but I am confident that i’m translating accurately, regardless of how slow i’m going. If you put whole sentences or passages of text into Google Translate, all it’s going to give you is a garbled mess. You have to know the grammer to understand how all the bits and pieces slot together. There’s a lot of little nuances that online translators haven’t figured out yet. If you’re looking to learn japanese on your own, I’d recommend Tae Kim’s grammar guide (http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/). There’s also loads of basic reading resources all over the internet and /a/ even has daily japanese threads if you need any help.
Brief sidenote, it looks like UGCP has a new VN in the works!
Possibly with the same artist as Maison de M.
Consider the huge amount of time translating a visual novel takes, i’m not going to get into speculating about my next project until after i’m done with this one. Hell, by the time i’m finished, there might be new games out.
In case anyone wants to make sure they’re seeing ALL THE BITS in day 2 here’s this handy guide

None of the choices in Day 1 mean anything, but one of them gets you an ~Imaginary Sex Scene~

Hello, i’m Scoops, and I translating Maison De M, a Bara Visual Novel from UGCP. I began this project some months ago and progress has been very slow, but i’m still getting shit done. I’ve finished the first two Chapters (There are like 25 chapters), and made a patch for them, so if you’ve got the game (it’s in places on the internet, just google around) just put the patch in the folder and run the game, everything’ll work automatically. I’m doing this by myself, so don’t expect updates too frequently. Feel free to ask me if you have any questions.