I'd say it's possible, but not necessarily practical. Even though you can directly translate things easily enough, there's a lot of context that doesn't get translated with something like Google Translate. Take literature, for example; you can give three people an original text, and they will translate it three different ways. Similar? Certainly, but each also contains small, yet distinct, variances in the translation, which can actually be pretty important.
Plus, especially considering a JP to US translation, there's a lot of stylistic choices to be made. Words like baka, kawaii, and titles of persons might've been translated directly into English years ago, but nowadays I'd say it's arguably better to include some of these common terms (and, gauging the potential audience of JP games, I'd assume they're more likely to both want and understand some of these basic terms).
Additionally, cultural context is a consideration as well.
For games, like literature I'm sure, there also has to be a greater sense of general understanding of themes, ideas, etc. to get a quality translation (listening to the music, seeing the art style, and playing the game, I would argue, are important parts of the translation process, even though it requires no lingual translation... but I suppose I wouldn't know how many translation departments actually do so).
Even though my experience with translation is almost zilch (the largest project I've undertaken was translating a single song for Chinese class), I think that there will always be a need for human translators. Even though the job seems pretty straightforward, translators play an incredibly important role, and a game (at least, for bi-lingual fans) can make it or break it depending on a good translation. There are things that I just wouldn't trust a computer to catch, understand, and translate properly, even with a sophisticated code.
But, I would say that the tech would be useful. I think Google has some kind of thing where you can take a picture of words in a foreign language, and it translates them. Something like that would be nice for, let's say, a Gameboy game that doesn't need much in the way of translation, but requires some in order to properly play it.
I think there's one article which talks about the translation of Danganronpa and the Zero Escape series, but those contain spoilers, I believe. I should read them, though... this is a good question, and it'd do some good to understand more about the process.
