Metal Wolf Chaos Translation, Need advice. Options

[Cylide]

Ok, so I've been playing Metal Wolf Chaos, a really damn fun game, Problem is most of it is in Japanese. Now its simple enough that I understand the game enough to play it.

But hey, I like a challenge and I'm never happy unless I'm messing with stuff, so I figured I'd try and do a small scale translation on it. Just some menu options and stuff so its a little easier to navigate and understand what the hell is going on sometimes.

The main issue here is I have no friggin clue where to start.

So heres my main questions:
Where are game text files usually stored (file types)
What tools exist to extract these files?
Anything like this exist for other games?
Anything I should know before I start this?

Utter newbie to modding really. But I'm willing to learn and I want to give something back.