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Also worth mentioning: on VNDB if it is machine translated it is marked as such, for example on Aonatsu Line https://vndb.org/v24702 there is a machine translation patch for the trial Switch version of the VN, and a currently in work fan translation for the PC version, the machine translation is very clearly marked. On VNDB you can even set your settings to ignore machine translations, which is how I have mine set as they're almost never edited or looked at in any manner and therefore are incredibly hard to get through. Imagine the worst localization you've read and then double it and you'll get what a MTL is usually like. A lot of times if you can't find the link for the translation patch on VNDB for whatever reason if you ask in the discussions on there, or do some google-fu you'll be able to find it without too much trouble. This is really only applicable to those VN's that were translated by an anon or someone without a group where the google drive / mega / etc. link may be dead. To go into a bit more detail of what Clephas said, the average fan translation takes years, and frankly it's a relatively thankless job they're doing, and I can't say 100% aren't, but the vast majority are completely uncompensated for it. The hours put in are absolutely immense, and the translations are - usually - done by a team of at least 3-5 people who all have other commitments (school, jobs, etc.).

90% of the patches (from 2005-2018) were done entirely through manual translation with mtl only being used for individual words. This was because it was only recently that some MTL apps/sites/etc could actually translate a complete sentence from Japanese to English coherently. Even now, they can't handle proverbs, colloquialisms, and slang/local dialects, so they are only used for 'rough' first-day patches, mostly on indie VNs. Edit: The reason I feel a need to mention this is because these people put a ton of work into something that didn't get them anything but prestige and has mostly been forgotten in the years since. This is literally hundreds or even thousands of hours of work in some cases, done in people's free time. While some of these fan patches were later purchased by localization companies and retooled for localization, there are still a number of games where my statement still applies.