As I said, I would be willing to take a shot at it, and bring in at least one other person, who is capable, although inexperienced.  If someone is willing to translate then that saves me from asking someone, which would be 50-50 depending on his workload this semester.

I emailed Corey a long time ago, but then I fell off the face of the planet and I have heard nothing from him since.

If it is about to go into the deadzone, and no one has any problems I want =p

Please excuse me, I just read most everything through, and it seems death has befallen this, so if no one raises any objections, I am going to pick up the pieces.

I do not suppose if anyone knows, without me looking yet, whether this game shares anything in common with Persona2, in terms of text storage, data storage, or compression?

Give me a short while, I am getting everything prepared, please do not expect anything for at least a short while, but when I get something done, I will post it.

After a glance it seems, that the snow queen quest is still in the US release, this could be extremely helpful in shortening the amount of time this takes. I would like to ask, is this the only change from the first release? It is the only one I am aware of.
 
It still goes without saying that a translator is needed, and it is evident that you have, at the very least "some" experience with this series    I will do my best to hold up my end of the bargain.

The Snow Queen Quest was dummied out.. (and never translated beyond a couple of lines of text)
Nearly all of the main characters were changed graphically.. (one character turned black for absolutely no reason)
The currency was changed from Yen to the Dollar.. (this also effectively made many items cheaper to buy)
Enemy encounter rates were lowered by a fair bit in comparison to the original.. (meh)
And.. yea, the entire translation was butchered to hell and back, but we all knew that. >_>

I think there might have been a few other minor changes here and there, but those are definitely the most notable. A translation of the original JP game rather than a retranslation of the US game would be ideal I think, since fixing all of the issues in the US game would be a lot more more trouble than it is worth in comparison to working with the original game (or so I suspect, though a lot of work would be involved either way).. That said though, I'd really really like to see this game have a proper translation made for it.. the game just deserves better treatment than it was given.

Ultimately I think everyone would just be satisfied with a proper translation, a graphical fix for the characters, and the Snow Queen Quest restored.. All of which should be doable with the US version, albeit it might take a bit of fussing to accomplish. (while there has been some success importing the graphical avatars over, I've yet to see anyone succeed in moving the battle sprites over.. and I am unsure as to what you can expect with the Snow Queen Quest, though I imagine that one shouldn't be too much of a hassle on its own.. though it may be worth mentioning that that particular quest has its own FMV that was never translated.. if working with the US version, it would be a little inconsistent for that to be the only FMV that's not dubbed. There are a number of resolutions to that problem, though I don't know which I'd really call ideal.)

The currency and rate modifications might be simpler than I think, but I have the sinking suspicion that they'll be a royal pain in the arse to fix in the US version. Or rather.. it'd be a rather big annoyance to fix.. For example, I've heard that the encounter rates are true to their JP counterpart in the dummied out Snow Queen Quest, suggesting every area in the game has its own unique encounter rate.. that would mean doing a fair bit of research into the JP version and modifying the rates to each area accordingly.. possibly by hand. And while the currency issue itself might seem solely aesthetic, it did result in making many things cheaper in the US version in comparison to the original, and I doubt it would be any easier to resolve than the encounter rates.. (but I really don't know how they achieved the conversion, so there may be an easier way than what I suspect..)

Regardless of which version you choose or what changes you decide upon though.. I wish you a ton of luck in your endeavor.

So what's happening with the translation? Is it still going ahead? If it is, I'd be interested in helping out with some of the text hacking, although I'm not that experienced If it's not, I really hope that a translator picks this game up. If there's one game I've always wanted to see with a proper translation, it's definitely this one.

Simply copypasting the dialouges from US to JP won't do it,
since ATLUS NA had to rewrite the whole script in order to
erase all relations to the japanese culture.

And don't forget about the Snow Queen Quest Quest which
can't be found in the american release of the game.

I would love to see a project similar to Geminis, which works
on a translation from JP to US.

Unfortunately that's something not many can accomplish at
this time, since most people lack either interest in the game
or time.

I was simply saying that by using the US version I could easily tell what was to be replaced with what, I have absolutely no understanding of the Japanese language (nor any desire to learn it). Now going in and changing everything by hand would be time consuming, and tedious as all hell, but a text dump of text I do not understand would leave me at a disadvantage.

I never had any intention of copy pasting anything, my idea was to find a way to unlock the snow queen quest, change character portrait and sprite for mark. I was not aware of the encounter rate changes and other tweaks. What I wanted was to be able to retranslate a game, using a version of the game that was in my native language.

I have been working on the US version as it is what I have, but that is more for learning how everything is stored, on the off chance the Japanese version has everything stored differently I would be at square one (instead of say square 2.5)

I have found how and where character portraits are stored, and done the exact same thing that the first poster did, that was as a basic test and took me a 10 minutes, since then I have not really picked it up. No way around it this game needs a retranslation, of course it would be just as big a waste for me to dump two games text, so it seems the most efficient route is to simply muster up, procure a copy of the jp game and work on that instead.

The last problem arises in (and this is far in the possible future) getting the game to run on real hardware, I have absolutely no experience in this field, my expertise is in epsxe emulation, and playstation emulation in general, so that is another hurdle altogether I have to contemplate.