To add to what I mentioned in my last post:
While having nicely organized, easily accessible text would be very handy for purposes of translation, what would be even cooler would be a “text edit” option in the debug mode so that you can actually translate the original text while you play the game.
For example, you’re playing some dinky little RPG, walk into town, talk to random NPC. The character’s dialogue pops up in a text box, as usual… and then you hit F1 or whatever to go into debug mode, hit the Edit option, and you can actually delete and replace the text, right there in the game. Gives you a chance to see the text in context while you translate it, rather than trying to make sense from an out-of-context text dump…
Of course, I’m nowhere near being able to implement something like this, but I think it’s an awesome idea which I will most definitely make a point of implementing if and when I am capable of doing so… and if I ever make something worth implementing it in.