Ok, your post is lacking a bit of necessary info:
-Do you have Atlas or other supported offline translation dictionary/engine installed and linked?
-What steps have you already taken in attempting to resolve this?
What it sounds like you are saying, is that you can use online TL services(ie: Google, Baidu, Bing, etc) but the 'machine translation' doesn't work for you. If this is not the case, please let me know. Otherwise, make sure that you have an offline translator installed and linked to VNR. The 'translation power' of VNR as you called it, is actually that of Fujitsu Atlas, and other offline machine translators that VNR uses as dependencies. If you don't have Fujitsu Atlas installed, you should visit Sakimichi's tutorial site here for help installing.
As for hooking text, ITH should be able to replace VNR's Built-in text hooker with no issues. just make sure that you have the ITH folder linked to VNR and have that selected as your text hooker.