Nandemonai

If players' frustration by itself could kill publishers most of the companies currently dominating the gaming market would be long dead and gone.

The comments inside that thread will pretty much answer all your questions 

Good graphics, but the story setup is not the most interesting. Also VNDB has it as 2.8 nukige. I think there are plenty of people interested in such a title, but it seems that those who are tend to be silent, as in they don't post on boards or forums. Nukige is generally viewed as a bad thing for people here and on VNDB's boards. However nukige is also those who gets the most votes on VNDB, indicating that a number of people are indeed interested, but are less likely to have an account and post about it here. Because of this I suspect replies here could be misleading towards how many could be interested in your translation.
 
You are off to a good start. You have extracted the script, changed some text and managed to get it back into the VN. That can be a hard task to accomplish and some people translate thinking they can always figure out how to get the text back in later. That's not a good idea if later turns out to be never.
Do you mean VNR's ability to extract text or do "translation tool" refer to a machine translation? I suspect it can be read both ways.

Baku Ane ~We'll Squeeze it out, Little Brother!~ TL Project
Original Title: Baku Ane ~Otouto Shibocchau zo!~ (ばくあね ～弟しぼっちゃうぞ！～)
Developer: Atelier Kaguya BARE&BUNNY
Website: http://www.a-kaguya.com/products_bb/products_bb.html
VNDB Link: https://vndb.org/v13943
Synopsis:
The protagonist is a famous soccer player, but due to a leg injury from a game, he must now rest until it heals. When he returns home, he is warmly greeted by his 4 older sisters whom he hasn't seen for a long time.

However, because his clubmates have play a prank on him and fill his bag with  H-manga, their relationships immediately plummet after they find out about it.

While trying to explain the situation to no avail, one of them suggests that they themselves should help him escape the 2D world and be interested in healthy adult women. Little does he know, all of his sisters love him more than a brother.

And so, this is the beginning of a ridiculous erotic life between our protagonist and his 4 tempting older sisters.
Archangel's Thoughts:
Ugh, I'm sorry, but I couldn't look at that disgusting original post anymore. It looked so cringeworthy, and tried so desperately hard to be "KOOL" and "HIP" and "RAD". So, I cleaned up the opening post to look more presentable, and more straightforward.
Team:
Leader:
-Archangel
Translator:
-Alpha
Editor
-[redacted]
-QC
-Archangel
-Binary Editor
-TLC
Progress:
Prologue: 3555/3555 Lines (100%)
Normal Route: (0%)
Noemi (Chloe) Route: (0%)
Alice Route: (0%)
Yurine Route: (0%)
Mio Route: (0%)
Naru Route: 455/6125 Lines (0%)
Harem Route: (0%)
LINKS:
DOWNLOADS DISCORD TWITTER RECRUITMENT

What did you just say about lolis sold to a brothel, Kokoro? I'll have you know I graduated top of my English Literature class at the University of Miami, and have over 50 confirmed credits as a visual novel editor. I am trained in English and I am well known as one of the top editors on Fuwanovel. As we speak I am contacting my network of experts across the internet right now to assemble and work on Musumaker together so you better prepare for the patch, maggot. If only you knew what kind of lolige your "clever" little comment was about to bring onto the world, maybe you would haven't clicked on "Submit Reply". But you couldn't, you didn't, and now the entire VN community will pay the price.

Maybe you should put a banana next to your bed so you don't die next night 卍
Did anyone understand that? Probably not. This is why you do localization not translation.

A translator must be able to understand what they are reading, beyond just being able to look up a word in a dictionary. If your version of understanding the source text is nothing more than looking it up word by word in a dictionary, you will be doing the same as a machine translation would do. So, before you consider becoming a translator for a real project, you should get better at understanding the language in general, which is really only done by studying a lot, and reading natively written Japanese texts etc.
In terms of how much kanji you need to know, that depends on what you're going to translate, and how serious you are about it. An official translator must know at least the 常用漢字 (common use kanji), and preferably even more, to truly comprehend what they are reading.
But, for fan translators, the main part to focus on is the general understanding of the grammar and such in whatever you are translating. Looking up a kanji compound is significantly easier than learning an entirely new piece of grammar. Additionally, as many grammar forms in Japanese have many different meanings, without the proper knowledge, you could easily pick the wrong meaning/ usage when you simply look the grammar form up on the internet.
So, first and foremost, it is important that you are capable of reading and understanding what you are translating. (So, if you want to translate a visual novel, start by reading the entire thing, and make sure you are capable of understanding it all. If you are, you can start looking into translating it.) Translating something without having read it first is never a good idea, anyways, as you'll be missing out on potentially important context etc.

TIL People from Portugal can't read minds. Must suck.
 
 
 
Scroll to GAME TECHNICAL SUPPORT and see if your problem is listed.

It could be useful for publicity for the project if you make a fancy project website, but other than that I don't really see the need. Even in the unlikely event that a VN engine supports html code, all the translation project should do would be to copy paste the code from the Japanese script. This is one of the reasons why I wrote the list is copy pasted from somewhere else and used without the knowledge of how VN translations work. Another issue is typesetter. This is the process of adding the text into anime or manga at the right location using the right font. A VN has the text in plain text with no styling (think txt document kind of styling) and then the engine will place the text where it's needed. There is nothing for a typesetter to do.
What is also eye catching is what is missing. There is no "job" for anybody responsible for extracting the script and injecting the translated script. Also the menu system tend to be in png format, meaning new png files should be made with English text. There is no request for anybody able to do such graphical work. However in a number of VNs, those tasks are so minor that if you have a team of the critical tasks (translator, editor etc), then requesting help from the forum/other translation projects can be a valid approach. It is however not instant, meaning it's likely hard to get this done if you don't even have a translator.
Other VNs really require to have people assigned to tasks like this. If the VN uses a custom engine then there is no tools available online and you have to make your own. If there are more than 5-10 imagines, which needs editing, then you need somebody in the project to work on those without relying on outside help. Musumaker falls into this category with hundreds of images needing translation and all tools are custom made.

I didn't intend to make fun of you. I was more like stunned at the post. It's so farfetched compared to anything else I have seen and I have seen quite a lot by now.
 
First of all, you have to realize translating even a single VN is a lot of work and there is no way you can handle more than one at a time. Secondly it will take a long time to finish even one. If you quit if you aren't done in half a year, you might as well quit now.
You need to extract the script from your chosen VN, make sure you can edit it and then put it back in. Once that is working you can start to consider an actual translation. You have to figure out what you will do yourself and what you need other people to do and then you need to figure out how to recruit the people you need.
I have some bad news regarding recruiting. People are not likely to join a project, which is stalled because it's missing people for key positions and it doesn't help that the leader is inexperienced and unknown. If you can't translate yourself and you don't already have a friend or something who can translate, then it will be really hard to get started. I have seen startups with multiple people, who actually knew what they were doing (sort of anyway) and they just needed a translator and then they stalled and died due to not being able to get one.
I know this is not a fun message to get, but unless you can provide more than you have shown so far, you will not get anybody to join you. Recruiting people is hard. I have tried for years with mixed result and that's not even for a startup.

I don't even know where to begin with this post. It's a new user, who wants to start no less than 7 translation projects, writes nothing about an existing team (is there any?) and the list of positions is copy pasted from anime or manga, which completely disregards that VN translations work differently. In other words this is just a wishlist for titles other people should pick up made by somebody who has no insights in how VNs are translated.
But wait, the fun doesn't end there. The list includes Sono Hanabira ni Kuchizuke o titles, a series Mangagamer is in progress of releasing, meaning if anybody starts on those, MG will likely not be too happy about it.
The aura of professionalism doesn't end there. Nothing is written about those titles and there aren't even links or anything. We will have to do our own research to figure out what they are even about. Also out of the 3 links in the profile, two of them are dead and the third goes to what looks like an empty profile.
 
I guess now it's time to lean back and grab the popcorn.

That's basically why I got involved.  They needed someone willing to do this.  That person needs to be able to translate as well; large parts of the script are shaky, especially the stuff translated early.
Well, nobody else seemed interested.  And I want to play SKM.  I had been planning to wait for Nocturnal Illusion (my other project) to release first, so people would have a feel for my skill level other than my say-so; but it didn't work out that way.  (A good thing, too; I got involved with SKM 18 months ago or so.)

You can  get some information about publishing figures.  Just not anything about visual novels directly.  All of the information about licensing fees and licensing terms is very much secret.  But there are times when companies get forced to reveal these secrets: when they have to go to court.  If you want to sue over something, you have to file the contracts, including real dollar figures, with the court.  And court documents are public.  Some lawsuits in the video game and anime business have resulted in some real interesting info surfacing over the years.
The complete contract between Bungie and Activision for publishing Destiny (which originally contemplated that Destiny 3 would already be out and Destiny 4 would come out next year) can be found here. A writeup of the significant parts (a contract is rather dry and boring) is here.
Now, Destiny is a far cry from your average visual novel.  But it's the only time a full contract has been released that I could find.  A bunch of stuff was released in the lawsuits over Curt Schilling and 38 studios: you can find more here and here (note that the actual document trove is no longer online).
But even that's a bit far afield.  There is some very interesting license data from the implosion of ADV Films, though.  When ADV was falling apart, Funimation sued them over a debt they said they bought from a Japanese company.  That led to some dollar figures being released. We know how much ADV paid for certain shows.  The list is on ANN and while anime is more popular than VNs, of the three I found, it's the closest match. I'm not going to reproduce the list here (just check ANN).  But there are a few things I can say about it:
1) It's not clear what these numbers are.  Are these the up-front minimum guarantee prices?  Or is this the total amount paid, including the up-front minimum guarantee and all the royalties that were owed?  Did they even owe any royalties?  The Crunchyroll coverage seems to imply that ADV paid a flat $25K per episode for 009-1.
2) Does this include the costs of translating the show and producing the DVDs?  Almost certainly not.  $21,335 for a TV show with 39 episodes (UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie) is not enough money.
3) The numbers vary widely.  The lowest price for a TV show is $21,335 for UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.  That's barely more than the $20K for the Air movie.  The highest price is pushing a million: $960K for Kurau Phantom Memory.  Four of the listed shows cost ADV more than three quarters of a million dollars, and one more is just under.  On the flip side, six others cost less than sixty grand.  The most expensive show cost ADV nearly forty five times the least expensive.
4) Licensing costs are probably paid by every company in the business.  Even MoeNovel (a Pulltop subsidiary) probably on paper pays Pulltop for the rights.  This is something I learned when I got a job.  I worked for the phone company for awhile, and I found out my department pays another department for the phone lines.  This seemed really weird to me; I was like 'why bother?'  My coworkers explained that because of the way budgets work, if that division provided the phones for free, their numbers would look terrible. The cost savings they generated would make everyone else in the company look good, but their bottom line would look terrible.  This would lead to them getting punished (for being 'unprofitable') for being successful.
Likewise, Moenovel is owned by Will.  Money that they generate goes into Will's pockets.  But they made that money off of Pulltop properties.  So the deals need to be structured in such a way that the Pulltop entity reaps the rewards of Moenovel's success.  It is probably safe to assume Moenovel pays something to Pulltop.
The only company that might not have to do this 'one part of the company pays another' thing is Frontwing, because they might not have set up a different entity to run the overseas business.  It's hard to say.
5) The non-licensing related costs are going to be relatively fixed and predictable.  They will be a product of the size (in bytes) of the script, with added complications for things like actual gameplay elements.  Scripting costs (engine work) are less predictable, but compared to a 45X variance factor in licensing costs?  That's not too significant.
6) Licensing costs vary widely.  Sol Press seems to be licensing on the cheap (i.e. not going after famous or hugely-successful Japanese projects).  For all but the cheapest licenses, however? Licensing fees likely dwarf all other costs associated with the release.  Witch's Love Diary's script is about 1.5 megabytes, or about 750K characters.  Now I know MG pays by the character (everyone does) but not how much: if they pay 1.5 cents per, that's about $11K.  If they pay 5 cents per, that would be about $37K.  [Edit: Apparently some companies pay by the character, some by the line.  That probably won't change this math too much.]
Both of these guesstimates are on the low end of the ADV price chart.  Visual Novel licensing fees are going to be quite a bit lower (they have to be, or there's no business to be done, sales just aren't high enough).  But still.
7) For most titles, the licensing fee is probably the biggest cost.  Since this is the part that's least predictable, it's extremely difficult to say what a given title might have cost.

I'm assuming that you're just shitposting, but I actually went and counted each unreleased title Sekai (I'm including Denpasoft and non-JP titles that aren't in English, because they're most likely translating them) and MangaGamer have.
Sekai: 30 titles (not including the secret announcements they added to their tracker)
MangaGamer: 22 titles (I'm not including DLC, and I'm not including the titles they hinted at but didn't announce yet)
I'm not too sure if this list is comprehensive, and I'm too lazy to double-check  : P

Committing money to an unreleased product is always a gamble--except unlike gambling, any surprises will generally be unpleasant.  The entire premise of crowdfunding is to push the risk of creative development from developers onto end-users.  If risk avoidance is your main priority, then any first-time publisher will be a greater risk than Sekai Project--and really, you shouldn't be in the crowdfunding business at all.  Take that money and invest it--where you'll be compensated for taking risks, rather than penalized.

You can  get some information about publishing figures.  Just not anything about visual novels directly.  All of the information about licensing fees and licensing terms is very much secret.  But there are times when companies get forced to reveal these secrets: when they have to go to court.  If you want to sue over something, you have to file the contracts, including real dollar figures, with the court.  And court documents are public.  Some lawsuits in the video game and anime business have resulted in some real interesting info surfacing over the years.
The complete contract between Bungie and Activision for publishing Destiny (which originally contemplated that Destiny 3 would already be out and Destiny 4 would come out next year) can be found here. A writeup of the significant parts (a contract is rather dry and boring) is here.
Now, Destiny is a far cry from your average visual novel.  But it's the only time a full contract has been released that I could find.  A bunch of stuff was released in the lawsuits over Curt Schilling and 38 studios: you can find more here and here (note that the actual document trove is no longer online).
But even that's a bit far afield.  There is some very interesting license data from the implosion of ADV Films, though.  When ADV was falling apart, Funimation sued them over a debt they said they bought from a Japanese company.  That led to some dollar figures being released. We know how much ADV paid for certain shows.  The list is on ANN and while anime is more popular than VNs, of the three I found, it's the closest match. I'm not going to reproduce the list here (just check ANN).  But there are a few things I can say about it:
1) It's not clear what these numbers are.  Are these the up-front minimum guarantee prices?  Or is this the total amount paid, including the up-front minimum guarantee and all the royalties that were owed?  Did they even owe any royalties?  The Crunchyroll coverage seems to imply that ADV paid a flat $25K per episode for 009-1.
2) Does this include the costs of translating the show and producing the DVDs?  Almost certainly not.  $21,335 for a TV show with 39 episodes (UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie) is not enough money.
3) The numbers vary widely.  The lowest price for a TV show is $21,335 for UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.  That's barely more than the $20K for the Air movie.  The highest price is pushing a million: $960K for Kurau Phantom Memory.  Four of the listed shows cost ADV more than three quarters of a million dollars, and one more is just under.  On the flip side, six others cost less than sixty grand.  The most expensive show cost ADV nearly forty five times the least expensive.
4) Licensing costs are probably paid by every company in the business.  Even MoeNovel (a Pulltop subsidiary) probably on paper pays Pulltop for the rights.  This is something I learned when I got a job.  I worked for the phone company for awhile, and I found out my department pays another department for the phone lines.  This seemed really weird to me; I was like 'why bother?'  My coworkers explained that because of the way budgets work, if that division provided the phones for free, their numbers would look terrible. The cost savings they generated would make everyone else in the company look good, but their bottom line would look terrible.  This would lead to them getting punished (for being 'unprofitable') for being successful.
Likewise, Moenovel is owned by Will.  Money that they generate goes into Will's pockets.  But they made that money off of Pulltop properties.  So the deals need to be structured in such a way that the Pulltop entity reaps the rewards of Moenovel's success.  It is probably safe to assume Moenovel pays something to Pulltop.
The only company that might not have to do this 'one part of the company pays another' thing is Frontwing, because they might not have set up a different entity to run the overseas business.  It's hard to say.
5) The non-licensing related costs are going to be relatively fixed and predictable.  They will be a product of the size (in bytes) of the script, with added complications for things like actual gameplay elements.  Scripting costs (engine work) are less predictable, but compared to a 45X variance factor in licensing costs?  That's not too significant.
6) Licensing costs vary widely.  Sol Press seems to be licensing on the cheap (i.e. not going after famous or hugely-successful Japanese projects).  For all but the cheapest licenses, however? Licensing fees likely dwarf all other costs associated with the release.  Witch's Love Diary's script is about 1.5 megabytes, or about 750K characters.  Now I know MG pays by the character (everyone does) but not how much: if they pay 1.5 cents per, that's about $11K.  If they pay 5 cents per, that would be about $37K.  [Edit: Apparently some companies pay by the character, some by the line.  That probably won't change this math too much.]
Both of these guesstimates are on the low end of the ADV price chart.  Visual Novel licensing fees are going to be quite a bit lower (they have to be, or there's no business to be done, sales just aren't high enough).  But still.
7) For most titles, the licensing fee is probably the biggest cost.  Since this is the part that's least predictable, it's extremely difficult to say what a given title might have cost.

You can  get some information about publishing figures.  Just not anything about visual novels directly.  All of the information about licensing fees and licensing terms is very much secret.  But there are times when companies get forced to reveal these secrets: when they have to go to court.  If you want to sue over something, you have to file the contracts, including real dollar figures, with the court.  And court documents are public.  Some lawsuits in the video game and anime business have resulted in some real interesting info surfacing over the years.
The complete contract between Bungie and Activision for publishing Destiny (which originally contemplated that Destiny 3 would already be out and Destiny 4 would come out next year) can be found here. A writeup of the significant parts (a contract is rather dry and boring) is here.
Now, Destiny is a far cry from your average visual novel.  But it's the only time a full contract has been released that I could find.  A bunch of stuff was released in the lawsuits over Curt Schilling and 38 studios: you can find more here and here (note that the actual document trove is no longer online).
But even that's a bit far afield.  There is some very interesting license data from the implosion of ADV Films, though.  When ADV was falling apart, Funimation sued them over a debt they said they bought from a Japanese company.  That led to some dollar figures being released. We know how much ADV paid for certain shows.  The list is on ANN and while anime is more popular than VNs, of the three I found, it's the closest match. I'm not going to reproduce the list here (just check ANN).  But there are a few things I can say about it:
1) It's not clear what these numbers are.  Are these the up-front minimum guarantee prices?  Or is this the total amount paid, including the up-front minimum guarantee and all the royalties that were owed?  Did they even owe any royalties?  The Crunchyroll coverage seems to imply that ADV paid a flat $25K per episode for 009-1.
2) Does this include the costs of translating the show and producing the DVDs?  Almost certainly not.  $21,335 for a TV show with 39 episodes (UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie) is not enough money.
3) The numbers vary widely.  The lowest price for a TV show is $21,335 for UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.  That's barely more than the $20K for the Air movie.  The highest price is pushing a million: $960K for Kurau Phantom Memory.  Four of the listed shows cost ADV more than three quarters of a million dollars, and one more is just under.  On the flip side, six others cost less than sixty grand.  The most expensive show cost ADV nearly forty five times the least expensive.
4) Licensing costs are probably paid by every company in the business.  Even MoeNovel (a Pulltop subsidiary) probably on paper pays Pulltop for the rights.  This is something I learned when I got a job.  I worked for the phone company for awhile, and I found out my department pays another department for the phone lines.  This seemed really weird to me; I was like 'why bother?'  My coworkers explained that because of the way budgets work, if that division provided the phones for free, their numbers would look terrible. The cost savings they generated would make everyone else in the company look good, but their bottom line would look terrible.  This would lead to them getting punished (for being 'unprofitable') for being successful.
Likewise, Moenovel is owned by Will.  Money that they generate goes into Will's pockets.  But they made that money off of Pulltop properties.  So the deals need to be structured in such a way that the Pulltop entity reaps the rewards of Moenovel's success.  It is probably safe to assume Moenovel pays something to Pulltop.
The only company that might not have to do this 'one part of the company pays another' thing is Frontwing, because they might not have set up a different entity to run the overseas business.  It's hard to say.
5) The non-licensing related costs are going to be relatively fixed and predictable.  They will be a product of the size (in bytes) of the script, with added complications for things like actual gameplay elements.  Scripting costs (engine work) are less predictable, but compared to a 45X variance factor in licensing costs?  That's not too significant.
6) Licensing costs vary widely.  Sol Press seems to be licensing on the cheap (i.e. not going after famous or hugely-successful Japanese projects).  For all but the cheapest licenses, however? Licensing fees likely dwarf all other costs associated with the release.  Witch's Love Diary's script is about 1.5 megabytes, or about 750K characters.  Now I know MG pays by the character (everyone does) but not how much: if they pay 1.5 cents per, that's about $11K.  If they pay 5 cents per, that would be about $37K.  [Edit: Apparently some companies pay by the character, some by the line.  That probably won't change this math too much.]
Both of these guesstimates are on the low end of the ADV price chart.  Visual Novel licensing fees are going to be quite a bit lower (they have to be, or there's no business to be done, sales just aren't high enough).  But still.
7) For most titles, the licensing fee is probably the biggest cost.  Since this is the part that's least predictable, it's extremely difficult to say what a given title might have cost.

You can  get some information about publishing figures.  Just not anything about visual novels directly.  All of the information about licensing fees and licensing terms is very much secret.  But there are times when companies get forced to reveal these secrets: when they have to go to court.  If you want to sue over something, you have to file the contracts, including real dollar figures, with the court.  And court documents are public.  Some lawsuits in the video game and anime business have resulted in some real interesting info surfacing over the years.
The complete contract between Bungie and Activision for publishing Destiny (which originally contemplated that Destiny 3 would already be out and Destiny 4 would come out next year) can be found here. A writeup of the significant parts (a contract is rather dry and boring) is here.
Now, Destiny is a far cry from your average visual novel.  But it's the only time a full contract has been released that I could find.  A bunch of stuff was released in the lawsuits over Curt Schilling and 38 studios: you can find more here and here (note that the actual document trove is no longer online).
But even that's a bit far afield.  There is some very interesting license data from the implosion of ADV Films, though.  When ADV was falling apart, Funimation sued them over a debt they said they bought from a Japanese company.  That led to some dollar figures being released. We know how much ADV paid for certain shows.  The list is on ANN and while anime is more popular than VNs, of the three I found, it's the closest match. I'm not going to reproduce the list here (just check ANN).  But there are a few things I can say about it:
1) It's not clear what these numbers are.  Are these the up-front minimum guarantee prices?  Or is this the total amount paid, including the up-front minimum guarantee and all the royalties that were owed?  Did they even owe any royalties?  The Crunchyroll coverage seems to imply that ADV paid a flat $25K per episode for 009-1.
2) Does this include the costs of translating the show and producing the DVDs?  Almost certainly not.  $21,335 for a TV show with 39 episodes (UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie) is not enough money.
3) The numbers vary widely.  The lowest price for a TV show is $21,335 for UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.  That's barely more than the $20K for the Air movie.  The highest price is pushing a million: $960K for Kurau Phantom Memory.  Four of the listed shows cost ADV more than three quarters of a million dollars, and one more is just under.  On the flip side, six others cost less than sixty grand.  The most expensive show cost ADV nearly forty five times the least expensive.
4) Licensing costs are probably paid by every company in the business.  Even MoeNovel (a Pulltop subsidiary) probably on paper pays Pulltop for the rights.  This is something I learned when I got a job.  I worked for the phone company for awhile, and I found out my department pays another department for the phone lines.  This seemed really weird to me; I was like 'why bother?'  My coworkers explained that because of the way budgets work, if that division provided the phones for free, their numbers would look terrible. The cost savings they generated would make everyone else in the company look good, but their bottom line would look terrible.  This would lead to them getting punished (for being 'unprofitable') for being successful.
Likewise, Moenovel is owned by Will.  Money that they generate goes into Will's pockets.  But they made that money off of Pulltop properties.  So the deals need to be structured in such a way that the Pulltop entity reaps the rewards of Moenovel's success.  It is probably safe to assume Moenovel pays something to Pulltop.
The only company that might not have to do this 'one part of the company pays another' thing is Frontwing, because they might not have set up a different entity to run the overseas business.  It's hard to say.
5) The non-licensing related costs are going to be relatively fixed and predictable.  They will be a product of the size (in bytes) of the script, with added complications for things like actual gameplay elements.  Scripting costs (engine work) are less predictable, but compared to a 45X variance factor in licensing costs?  That's not too significant.
6) Licensing costs vary widely.  Sol Press seems to be licensing on the cheap (i.e. not going after famous or hugely-successful Japanese projects).  For all but the cheapest licenses, however? Licensing fees likely dwarf all other costs associated with the release.  Witch's Love Diary's script is about 1.5 megabytes, or about 750K characters.  Now I know MG pays by the character (everyone does) but not how much: if they pay 1.5 cents per, that's about $11K.  If they pay 5 cents per, that would be about $37K.  [Edit: Apparently some companies pay by the character, some by the line.  That probably won't change this math too much.]
Both of these guesstimates are on the low end of the ADV price chart.  Visual Novel licensing fees are going to be quite a bit lower (they have to be, or there's no business to be done, sales just aren't high enough).  But still.
7) For most titles, the licensing fee is probably the biggest cost.  Since this is the part that's least predictable, it's extremely difficult to say what a given title might have cost.

You can  get some information about publishing figures.  Just not anything about visual novels directly.  All of the information about licensing fees and licensing terms is very much secret.  But there are times when companies get forced to reveal these secrets: when they have to go to court.  If you want to sue over something, you have to file the contracts, including real dollar figures, with the court.  And court documents are public.  Some lawsuits in the video game and anime business have resulted in some real interesting info surfacing over the years.
The complete contract between Bungie and Activision for publishing Destiny (which originally contemplated that Destiny 3 would already be out and Destiny 4 would come out next year) can be found here. A writeup of the significant parts (a contract is rather dry and boring) is here.
Now, Destiny is a far cry from your average visual novel.  But it's the only time a full contract has been released that I could find.  A bunch of stuff was released in the lawsuits over Curt Schilling and 38 studios: you can find more here and here (note that the actual document trove is no longer online).
But even that's a bit far afield.  There is some very interesting license data from the implosion of ADV Films, though.  When ADV was falling apart, Funimation sued them over a debt they said they bought from a Japanese company.  That led to some dollar figures being released. We know how much ADV paid for certain shows.  The list is on ANN and while anime is more popular than VNs, of the three I found, it's the closest match. I'm not going to reproduce the list here (just check ANN).  But there are a few things I can say about it:
1) It's not clear what these numbers are.  Are these the up-front minimum guarantee prices?  Or is this the total amount paid, including the up-front minimum guarantee and all the royalties that were owed?  Did they even owe any royalties?  The Crunchyroll coverage seems to imply that ADV paid a flat $25K per episode for 009-1.
2) Does this include the costs of translating the show and producing the DVDs?  Almost certainly not.  $21,335 for a TV show with 39 episodes (UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie) is not enough money.
3) The numbers vary widely.  The lowest price for a TV show is $21,335 for UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.  That's barely more than the $20K for the Air movie.  The highest price is pushing a million: $960K for Kurau Phantom Memory.  Four of the listed shows cost ADV more than three quarters of a million dollars, and one more is just under.  On the flip side, six others cost less than sixty grand.  The most expensive show cost ADV nearly forty five times the least expensive.
4) Licensing costs are probably paid by every company in the business.  Even MoeNovel (a Pulltop subsidiary) probably on paper pays Pulltop for the rights.  This is something I learned when I got a job.  I worked for the phone company for awhile, and I found out my department pays another department for the phone lines.  This seemed really weird to me; I was like 'why bother?'  My coworkers explained that because of the way budgets work, if that division provided the phones for free, their numbers would look terrible. The cost savings they generated would make everyone else in the company look good, but their bottom line would look terrible.  This would lead to them getting punished (for being 'unprofitable') for being successful.
Likewise, Moenovel is owned by Will.  Money that they generate goes into Will's pockets.  But they made that money off of Pulltop properties.  So the deals need to be structured in such a way that the Pulltop entity reaps the rewards of Moenovel's success.  It is probably safe to assume Moenovel pays something to Pulltop.
The only company that might not have to do this 'one part of the company pays another' thing is Frontwing, because they might not have set up a different entity to run the overseas business.  It's hard to say.
5) The non-licensing related costs are going to be relatively fixed and predictable.  They will be a product of the size (in bytes) of the script, with added complications for things like actual gameplay elements.  Scripting costs (engine work) are less predictable, but compared to a 45X variance factor in licensing costs?  That's not too significant.
6) Licensing costs vary widely.  Sol Press seems to be licensing on the cheap (i.e. not going after famous or hugely-successful Japanese projects).  For all but the cheapest licenses, however? Licensing fees likely dwarf all other costs associated with the release.  Witch's Love Diary's script is about 1.5 megabytes, or about 750K characters.  Now I know MG pays by the character (everyone does) but not how much: if they pay 1.5 cents per, that's about $11K.  If they pay 5 cents per, that would be about $37K.  [Edit: Apparently some companies pay by the character, some by the line.  That probably won't change this math too much.]
Both of these guesstimates are on the low end of the ADV price chart.  Visual Novel licensing fees are going to be quite a bit lower (they have to be, or there's no business to be done, sales just aren't high enough).  But still.
7) For most titles, the licensing fee is probably the biggest cost.  Since this is the part that's least predictable, it's extremely difficult to say what a given title might have cost.

Not quite time for a status update yet.  I just can't resist posting this here.
犬のくせに、その声に興奮しているのか、セキトは鼻先をさらに下の方に移動させて、焔耶の股間に狙いを……。
He's just a dog, but Enya's sweet husky voice seems to drive Sekito wild, and he starts nosing around wildly. Towards Enya's crotch...
って、お前はバター犬か！
Now, literally the above line means "Hey! You're not a butter dog!" - which doesn't seem like it makes a lot of sense in context, does it?  Oh, yes it does.  SKM is actually referencing this urban legend!  This old saw is so old, it got memed before meme was even a verb!  More to the point, how popular is this story, if Japanese eroge writers have heard of an English-language urban legend?

i will miss the wonderful character "no valid string, make a ticket"

Okay, update time.  I know it's not the first of the month, but there was no way I was going to try using Fuwa while that April Fools' thing was up.  It turns out not to matter because I've been, uh, 'busy' the last few days.  Busy playing Prey.  Which is an awesome game, and if you haven't tried it you really ought to look into it.
Shoku
    Main                             78% (8097/10321)(+15%)
    Battle                       100% (299/299)
    Aisha, Touka                 37% (1546/4137)
    Ei, Yue                      36% (695/1954)
    Enya                         59% (1632/2777) (+58%)
    Hinari, Shuri                57% (1660/2907) (+35%)
    Iishe, Pairen, Reiha, Toshi  51% (1730/3377) (+15%)
    Kikyou, Shion                48% (1083/2277) (+47%)
    Mii                          36% (518/1448) (+9%)
    Nenene, Ren                  23% (752/3330) (+7%)
    Rinrin                       43% (1245/2912)
    Sei                          70% (1911/2734) (+1%)
    Sui, Tanpopo                 80% (2722/3409) (+3%)
    Shoku TL:99% (+2%) (41497/41882)  Edit:57% (+15%) (23890/41882) Untranslated H-scene routes: Sei & Rinrin have partial h-scene translations.
Gi:     4% (1390/38852)     Go:    5% (1360/25983)
Total:    24% (+5%) (26644/108888)

Okay, update time.  I know it's not the first of the month, but there was no way I was going to try using Fuwa while that April Fools' thing was up.  It turns out not to matter because I've been, uh, 'busy' the last few days.  Busy playing Prey.  Which is an awesome game, and if you haven't tried it you really ought to look into it.
Shoku
    Main                             78% (8097/10321)(+15%)
    Battle                       100% (299/299)
    Aisha, Touka                 37% (1546/4137)
    Ei, Yue                      36% (695/1954)
    Enya                         59% (1632/2777) (+58%)
    Hinari, Shuri                57% (1660/2907) (+35%)
    Iishe, Pairen, Reiha, Toshi  51% (1730/3377) (+15%)
    Kikyou, Shion                48% (1083/2277) (+47%)
    Mii                          36% (518/1448) (+9%)
    Nenene, Ren                  23% (752/3330) (+7%)
    Rinrin                       43% (1245/2912)
    Sei                          70% (1911/2734) (+1%)
    Sui, Tanpopo                 80% (2722/3409) (+3%)
    Shoku TL:99% (+2%) (41497/41882)  Edit:57% (+15%) (23890/41882) Untranslated H-scene routes: Sei & Rinrin have partial h-scene translations.
Gi:     4% (1390/38852)     Go:    5% (1360/25983)
Total:    24% (+5%) (26644/108888)

Okay, update time.  I know it's not the first of the month, but there was no way I was going to try using Fuwa while that April Fools' thing was up.  It turns out not to matter because I've been, uh, 'busy' the last few days.  Busy playing Prey.  Which is an awesome game, and if you haven't tried it you really ought to look into it.
Shoku
    Main                             78% (8097/10321)(+15%)
    Battle                       100% (299/299)
    Aisha, Touka                 37% (1546/4137)
    Ei, Yue                      36% (695/1954)
    Enya                         59% (1632/2777) (+58%)
    Hinari, Shuri                57% (1660/2907) (+35%)
    Iishe, Pairen, Reiha, Toshi  51% (1730/3377) (+15%)
    Kikyou, Shion                48% (1083/2277) (+47%)
    Mii                          36% (518/1448) (+9%)
    Nenene, Ren                  23% (752/3330) (+7%)
    Rinrin                       43% (1245/2912)
    Sei                          70% (1911/2734) (+1%)
    Sui, Tanpopo                 80% (2722/3409) (+3%)
    Shoku TL:99% (+2%) (41497/41882)  Edit:57% (+15%) (23890/41882) Untranslated H-scene routes: Sei & Rinrin have partial h-scene translations.
Gi:     4% (1390/38852)     Go:    5% (1360/25983)
Total:    24% (+5%) (26644/108888)