MabiPro: The Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience

I'm not a translator, but is there any reason not to just mass-translate proper nouns (such as names and places), and by extension very common short phrases found in quests that have the same text/structure like "Return to <name>" or buttons like "yes/no"? I'd be able to make more sense of many things if the translations were partial.

Is there any reason text isn't just being copy pasta'd from official english servers?

Getting translations isn't really the issue. My understanding is that implementing translations has some limitations, and the technology to do it efficiently doesn't exist right now.

Can you go into more detail? I'd like to understand the problem a bit better.

EDIT: FWIW I'm a software engineer and if you need some kind of software or reverse engineering I may be able to help.

Machine translation is possible, however there is no developer working on such a project.

In terms of "copy/pasting from the official servers": this isn't possible. Text is stored server-side, so we don't actually have the text to copy paste from.

What about short phrases/single words that are translated in some cases but not others? Is there a path for someone external like myself to start on this?

General machine translation probably won't work well, and you may need to train an algorithm to have Mabinogi context to make it work better. It would probably be better to tackle translations individually using different resources (such as wiki, etc), since there is an end goal (the rate of translations exceeds the rate of new content).

I meant playing through on the official server while a logger catalogs incoming text from dialogs, which is just a very slow copy paste. I'm guessing that's how the original text was extracted (correct me if I'm wrong).

As someone who works on the Aura project, collecting English dialog is a very time consuming task. It can take me an entire day just to gather a mostly complete set of dialog for only 3 NPCs, and this is missing some harder to get dialog such as favor related dialog. Additionally this doesn't include any quests or part time jobs. It is a massive pain to collect and is very time consuming. It's probably still faster than translating in most cases, but its a very time consuming task.