How do you extract texts into a text format that you can copy and paste from visual novels? Let's say you want to extract texts from the visual novel for the purpose of looking up the word in the dictionary, or feeding them into a machine translator. How would one go about accomplishing this?
There are some software, such as Anime Games Text Hooker or Interactive Text Hooker, that are especially made for this purpose. Some people use them together with automated translation tools.

An AGTH tutorial, and an example screenshot of how it looks in action:


An ITH tutorial, and an example screenshot of how it looks in action: