I've been following this games translation for over a decade, Tom is mostly just a translator and Kingcom is someone who hacks the game to put the translation into it, The words have likely been translated to English in a text/script document for years and a good chunk are even in the game, Sadly the hard part is putting the translated words into the game in this case
"Dragon Quest Monsters 1&2 is undoubtedly among the nastiest games I’ve worked on. It needed many major programming changes that all came with their own set of resulting issues. Some systems of the game were just entirely unsuited to languages other than Japanese and needed a lot of manual work to get them working" -Kingcom, July-29-2015
Basically, Seems like significant parts of the game need to be hacked or reprogramed compared to most translation projects
I've seen since deleted tweets from Tom (he deletes all his tweets frequently) that said that the project isn't forgotten or abandoned yet
"Dragon Quest Monsters 1&2 is undoubtedly among the nastiest games I’ve worked on. It needed many major programming changes that all came with their own set of resulting issues. Some systems of the game were just entirely unsuited to languages other than Japanese and needed a lot of manual work to get them working" -Kingcom, July-29-2015
Basically, Seems like significant parts of the game need to be hacked or reprogramed compared to most translation projects
I've seen since deleted tweets from Tom (he deletes all his tweets frequently) that said that the project isn't forgotten or abandoned yet