I went to an anime convention earlier this year and bought a fan-made Death Note yaoi comic book. There’s no graphic sex in it, it’s mainly just L and Light talking, and I’d really like to know what they’re saying. I took pictures of each panel as clearly as I could, and could email them to whoever was willing to translate, or just upload them to the Internet if that makes things easier. I could even throw a few bucks in if the person asks.
Molto grazie for any help!
How many words are we talking about, roughly? Translators (J-E) usually charge about 10-20 cents (US) per word. Maybe some kind soul will do it for “a few bucks” though, I don’t know.
The comic has 30 pages, and I don’t really know how many words since it’s kind of a jumble of symbols. I didn’t think translation was that expensive, though.
Translation is not an easy task even for someone who is completely bilingual (and I speak from personal experience). The only people I would do free translations for would be my family and very close friends. 
Just an FYI.
No worries, but especially since what you want translated is not text that you can put into a word processor, but instead is text in the form of a picture (photo), you are really going to need an expert, not some hack like me, and to get that level of expertise in both languages is a skill that takes a lot of time to learn. If you’re lucky enough to know someone who has that skill then you could ask them to do it but you should bear in mind that it will take them a few hours and therefore you should consider reimbursing them like the skilled professional they are, like Hazel says. 
I don’t understand this. I ask people what someone said all the time, and it seems they can always just instantly know how to say it in my language.
Sure, a high quality translation that is 100% faithful takes a lot of work, but can’t quick translations be done rather easily? I had to do them all the time for songs in other languages–I just used a dictionary. They usually took only a couple hours.
Is it perhaps the difficulty in translating between non-Roman languages that makes this more difficult? (I note that all my friends who were bilingual spoke French, Spanish, German, or Polish.)
Probably. The syntax and grammar of English differs wildly from Korean, and there are often words that don’t have an exact translation. I can translate words and phrases on the spot, but anything longer than that takes a lot of mental effort, and I would certainly never be willing to do it for free unless I really loved that person.
A couple of hours - for a song. But this is a 30 page comic.
Other problems are:
It’s fanfic - so it’s probably going to have specific terminology that is difficult to know unless you already know the story. Given its nature, it might even be, god forbid, handwritten, by a non-native Japanese. If so… there’s just no telling how unintelligible it might be.
Not specifically directed at the OP, but just as a partial answer for BigT.
Japanese dictionaries are not as generally as efficient as (at least) English dictionaries are, for anyone under the level of native fluency.
With an English dictionary anyone who knows the letter order of the alphabet can look up a word fairly quickly in English. But with a Japanese paper dictionary, if you don’t know a particular kanji, then you don’t know how to pronounce it (although sometimes there are clues) so you can’t look it up without being able to identify the “radical”, which is a special part within the kanji that identifies to what group it belongs.* If you can’t identify the “radical” then all you are left with is counting the stroke number (e.g. - this kanji is written with 9 strokes) and then sifting through a list of kanji that have the same number of strokes to find the one you want. That takes time. The number of strokes that a kanji takes can also be tricky for beginners. For example, how many strokes does it take to write a square in kanji? Three.
Added to this is that hand-written kanji do not always look the same as printed kanji. They can have different shapes, yet be the ‘same’ kanji.
*Though these days, electronic dictionaries have input functions where you can draw the kanji and it will find it for you.