XSEED has to translate Rune Factory 4's cutscenes out of order

XSEED has provided Kotaku with a bunch of annotated pictures describing how totally bonkers the process of translating JRPGs such as Rune Factory 4 can be. I think the most egregious revelation here has to be that lines for translation appear in a somewhat random order in their Excel spreadsheets, meaning many lines get initially translated with no context whatsoever. Check them out after the jump.

Lots of this stuff sounds exactly like the kind of problem you'd expect in the mid 90s, rather than in late 2013. For example, any dialogue which references a specific holiday based on the game's clock, such as a harvest day or faux-Christmas doesn't actually include the name of the holiday, just a generic call for the game to input the relevant information. Which must be so awkward to write generic lines around and really makes me appreciate the quality of localisations we get, because it doesn't look easy.

Check out more horrible situations for translators in the images below. Thanks, Kotaku.