Why do so few light novels make it over via timely translation? There is a lot of great series translated by folks like Baka-Tsuki - so, why do series take forever to end up over here, and for that matter, once they're licensed - how come some releases are so spread apart?


Spice and Wolf used to be a 6-month release cycle from Yen Press - it has been reduced now but this is still quite long
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, and others also find themselves on strange timelines.


Does it really take that long to translate or is there something else here? I've heard things like they're licensed one at a time and they gauge sales before going on.
Light Novels are indeed harder to translate, but that isn't the real cause for their delay. The market for LN is really small outside Japan for a number of reasons so companies aren't interested in publishing them unless they are for very famous franchises (like Haruhi), and even then it's very risky.

As I said, translations and edition arent the reason per se, but that also affects. Translations in sites like Baka-Tsuki, while being done with lots of effort and having lots of stages for correction and quality check, doesn't quite fit the quality expected for a commercial release. Even in Baka-Tsuki the translations takes lots of time to be published, corrected and polished, so you can imagine how long that would take for a commercial-quality release.