...it's mostly psychological:
1. most titles either don't get a translation or get a cringeworthy machine one - I know very little *about* Japanese, yet it's still enough to see the butchery GT makes out of it (especially when it for no good reason tries its hand at being a thesaurus)
2. Japanese doesn't translate well into European languages: its specifics make simple translations sound very unnatural (for example, repetitions are in most of those stylistic errors, in Japanese though (or at least it seems so) if a word needs to be repeated, as in current context it can't be either omitted or referred relatively to, there is no such problem)
3. in-scene stuff translates even worse, both for linguistic and cultural differences
4. some of the time, translating the plot just isn't worth it, as it's that bad
In the end, some of those above may not apply here (haven't checked), yet I'm simply in the habit of ignoring the translations, even if it costs me some of the context.
If I get stuck in an RPG Maker game, I tend to just put it through the toy, try to find relevant switches/vars, then copy/paste the dialogs/descriptions from the toy into GT.
If that doesn't work or it isn't an RPG Maker game, I google for a walkthrough - usually you can find one, if the game gathers enough interest.
In case of SHRIFT, that doesn't work all that well, as while a wiki exists, it doesn't address the problems coming out of the language barrier; it's also quite vague on some points.