File editing has long been doable for a little while now and binary editing, not always necessary but good to have as well, is also possible so yes translations are possible. File formats and concepts seem to be broadly similar to the stuff seen on the DS and Wii so that is nice, I can not say I would suggest you get into it if you are not otherwise familiar with some kind of hacking or programming (it is very early days, tools are not well developed, there is no debugging emulator and hardware debugging is not great either).
ROMs are encrypted so you will need a means to decrypt them. This will require a full capability homebrew capable 3DS, traditionally this meant a 4.5 firmware 3ds but these days you can do it on 9.2 as well
https://gbatemp.net/threads/release-3ds_ctr_decryptor-void.370684/
Decryption generates a file you run against the original ROM and decrypt it that way, these files are commonly known as XORpads and you can not link them around here. Some people do share them out there in the world (they are the same size as the 3ds roms they handle so if you can make them then do).
There are various ways to encrypt them after you are done, for 3ds roms the two main ones are to encrypt it back with the xorpad or to encrypt it with an all 00 key. I favour the second but the first is possibly more useful if you want to make patches. Not sure what goes with CIA files made from hacked roms these days but that might also be an option.