As it's probably overdue, here's a quick post on the status of this project
1) Why's it taking so long?
There were a few complications. Over 2019-2020 my run of good luck with computers thoroughly ended, and I've suffered 4 computer failures over that period, of varying severity. Obviously that slows things down. However, the bigger issue recently is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, this project was something I primarily worked on during commutes, and thanks to COVID-19 I now work from home, so no more commutes. It took an embarrassing amount of time for me to realise the issue, so hopefully things will start progressing a bit faster now I'm actually allocating some time to work on this.
2) JapeTrans
JapeTrans continues. It's at about 90% done, excluding the GUI. It's also picked up a bunch of features that were low effort to implement but with outsized benefits. For example, it now has a binary patch format with cryptographic verification options, because fun fact: since RPGMaker XP, all RPGMaker engines can run arbitrary code on your computer, which means that any translation patch is a security risk (I'm aware that it's probably not that much more of a security risk than the pirated games a lot of people run, but still). Cryptographic verification at least produces something approaching a chain of trust, so that's an improvement, and the binary format has other benefits too (i.e. not having to parse the patch, more compact representation, compression). There's also support for multilingual patches (i.e. a patch that contains more than one target language, so in theory I could add in, I dunno, French or American English).
There's also a feature that's implemented for improving the lot of translators, but that's still being shaken out so I'll hold off on announcing that for now.
3) The VPM Patch
Is in fairly good shape, actually. It's advanced from where it was, certainly. One of the annoying things that did happen is that one of my computer failures exposed a problem in my backups, which was that while the patch was backed up, the version history of the patch was not, so I've lost a lot of the version history. However, that's probably not of too much interest to anyone other than me, because it means I don't have a good log of what I've done to it since the last release anymore.