The only difference between this project and many others is that Tru admitted to using a machine translation. It's ridiculous that this project is excluded from RHDN while Langfandood's worthless crap is still on here (which is, admittedly, a Whirlpool holdover that I now very much regret).

Clearly the solution here is to, A, release it as an April Fool's Day joke as Tater Bear mentioned, because according to I.S.T. those kinds of projects are excluded from any and all rules,

or B, just say you got a translator, and honestly no one will be the wiser. There's a right ton of patches on this site with text that's very obviously entirely made-up (here are two great examples), and they're only on the site because the hackers never told anybody it was made up. I don't think we should punish people in our community for being honest with us, and I don't see any need to discriminate in the first place.

Again, except for Langfandood, because fuck that.

Here are my thoughts on this matter. I do not mean to offend anyone.
I think this patch should be hosted here.
I will quote from RHDN “Overview – The Short Version”:

ROMhacking.net Site Goals and Features
Provide a central hub to encourage a new, refreshed, ROMhacking community.
Eliminate problems other sites have had that cause stagnation or site 'death'.
Provide a comprehensive document, utility, and translation archive.
Expand that archive to include whatever the community necessitates.
Put the power into the community member's hands for site operation and maintenance.
Provide an active, central, one stop news source for the community.
Provide a community database to tell you who is out there, who is active, and what they're doing!

Does not sound very “exclusive/elitist” to me, much rather like a place where newbies are welcomed warm-heartedly. But if someone has the hacking skills but is not lucky enough to find a translator he/she's screwed? There are patches on this site, that translate only menues etc. which can sometimes be done by machine translators. Now someone comes on who has actually used various translation programmes and used them for a whole game and he is forbidden to enter? Really I do not get it. If someone placed a “label” on a patch stating that it is V 0.6 and awaits script editing, would the patch be accepted?
What about RPGs (or other games) that are a lot of fun to play and the story is secondary? (You know, games like SRPGs or something like that.) Shouldn't people who want to “check this game out” be able to give it a go? Who knows, maybe someone tries this patch out, falls in love with the game and is able to help out with the translation editing or something of the likes. I always understood RHDN as a platform for finished projects AND projects in progress. Is “nothing” better than being able to play the game and roughly understand it? Is “nothing” better as long as we do not have a translation that matches certain literary standards? And who is the One to decide these standards?
In the readme of the Mystic Ark patch from D-D the lack of joint-ventures in some parts of this community was hinted. And refusing to host this patch seems, at least to me, exactly what is indirectly fostering this attitude. Either you already have all the needed positions filled, or you're out. And that is so NOT what I always imagined this site to be.
I am also against hosting childish simple graphic hacks. But if someone has managed to hack a complex game like an RPG and insert an (unedited/rough) script and thereby allows a previously Japanese game for an English speaker to be played from beginning to end, then I think this person has put a fair amount of effort into it. Denying this person the hosting of his/her project on THE major romhacking site seems really discouraging, if you ask me.
Quality standards have to be maintained, I totally agree, but these standards should not be used to prevent romhackers with only one area of expertise from exposing their work trough this site's prominence.

Personally I think it's utterly ridiculous it's not being hosted here. A machine translation can be just fine if the person plays through the game for context and uses dictionaries along with it. Hell I did over half of Last Bible Special that way before I found a translator to do the rest, it was hard and I had to use about 4 different sites, EDICT, and Atlas, but I doubt anyone could tell what I machined from what my translator did.

The guy has been working on this off and on for 8 years and then gets shut down here, what a kick in the face.

Don't have much to add here, but I think it should be hosted.  As long as the description says it's machine translated then the user will know what they're getting themselves into.  Also, we do have reviews now, so, if this is a huge abuse of MT, the reviews will reflect that.

There was a discussion of turning this into a poll. I saw it as a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. There was going to be a discussion either way. If the general consensus in this thread is we host the patch, then we host the patch. This is a community site after all. The main point in doing it this way was to keep the acrimony to a minimum. Several of the translation news posts in the past few months have turned into flamefests, which is a shame. I'm glad the news thread for this patch didn't join them.

All this talk about man vs. machine got me curious, so I ran some of the lines in "Dark Half" through Babelfish. Here are the results:

Original: 聞け人間ども 審判の時は来たのだ
Babelfish: At the time of hearing human judgment it came
Me: Hear me, puny humans! The time of judgment is upon ye...

Original: わが大地に解き放ちたる
Babelfish: It releases in our ground, the barrel
Me: I have been loosed upon this earth!

Original: きたれ、なんじ甘き死の時よ
Babelfish: Coming it droops, no [ji] comes sweetly at the time of death
Official translation: "Come, thou sweet death's hour" (Cantata BWV 161)

Babelfish completely missed the last one, although it was sort of unfair, I guess. The line is the title of Bach's Cantata 161, translated into Japanese. It's used in the game as a chapter title.

Also, there is a context-specific reason why I did not translate わが as "my" in the second line. Namely that it's a spoiler.

To reiterate a tired point, machine translation is fine for the basics and can be a real time-saver, but behind every truly great translation is a human translator or editor.

That being said, from the screenshots I saw, the translation wasn't half bad. Although I respectfully agree with the decision of the RHDN staff, I see no reason why the patch shouldn't be hosted.

Just call the patch version .5 and called it a WIP and then the person working on it can put up an advertisement on the site seeking the help of a translator.  PC Engine projects are pretty rare compared to other systems and I agree with many others and think it should be allowed here.