I am curious about the process involved in taking player feedback - In the past we have seen responses come from the community teams that seem vague, confused or perhaps just factually incorrect, additionally I'm curious as to what extent what we say has been sent over. Are threads distilled down to their most basic points, or are specific points and ideas taken by players and translated? For instance, if someone were to suggest in a thread about job balance a new ability would that get sent over, or would the finer points of the thread such as requests for a buff be taken into consideration. At any time during this are you or other staff on the team asked to clarify some points on the NA/EU forums?

I also am curious as to what qualifications are necessary to become a community representative - I'm assuming experience with the game is in there, but what else? It must be hard being one, the amount of misplaced shouting..
I honestly cannot speak to the community team's processes, because my contact with them as a member of the localization team is somewhat limited, but I can say I know they work very hard to ensure your voices are heard in ways that I cannot. The community teams for both languages relay what information they have, and report back whatever they can (there's no conspiracy, honest!) On the Japanese forums, the non-Matsui devs will sometimes chime in, but more often than not it's the community team relaying information. As for me, I speak to you as someone from the dev team whose involvement in the process is rather specific, and I hope that my being here adds something positive to your FINAL FANTASY XI experience.

As for the requirements for becoming a community rep or GM--that's something I have absolutely no knowledge of. Sorry.

How do you decide what does and does not get added to the autotranslate? And is there a possibility for the short versions of Job names to be added - I ask, because when trying to create a shout asking for certain jobs you'll find that the text buffer gets too full to accomodate everything you're asking for. Also, is it possible for Difficult, Very Difficult, Easy, and Normal to be added?
Autotranslate is a bit of a tricky one, especially when we had all four languages, but the planner in charge is always adding things as the situation arises. As for the short form job names, that's been brought up before, but the problem is that because the entries in Japanese would be so short, it would almost certainly cause issues when people try to use it in unintended ways.

To what extent to the developers play FFXI and other MMOs, and RPGs? It must be hard to both develop and enjoy a game at the same time, seeing how the sausage is made and what have you.
Although I can't speak to the gaming habits of all of our devs, the answer to FFXI is a resounding yes, we play it. A couple of our newer planners applied to the company specifically because they were XI players who wanted to work on the game. A lot of our battle planners are hard-core users. I can think of at least two people who met their spouses in-game. As for me, personally, I play pretty much anything and everything, from MMO to FPS, RTS, turn-based strategy, smartphone, PC, console, and more!

What difficulty is there in translating story elements? Are there any common idioms that would be hard to explain to a western audience that get changed? Any jokes that rely heavily on japanese pronunciation or culture? What decisions then have to go into translating these, and how much creative freedom do you have to do so?
When translating story elements, our general rule of thumb is that the story should always be the same, but it should read as if it was written for a Western audience, not a Japanese one. We are a Japanese company, and the original text is in Japanese, but there's one factor that trumps all--Vana'diel is not Japan. One of the critical missions that the event and story planners have to is create a Vana'diel that feels comfortable, familiar, and believable to a Japanese audience. My job is to take their framework and create a Vana'diel that feels comfortable, familiar, and believable to an English-speaking audience. Both of our English MMOs have extremely wide latitude in our translation processes, and we are able to change things like patterns of speech, jokes, dialogue structure, and the like if it means creating a final product that will resonate with the playerbase.

One example I like to give is what anime fans will recognize as the "tsundere" character. You know, the stereotypical "B-but it's not like I like you or anything!" This works for a Japanese audience. This works for an anime-enjoying Western audience. The problem is that it's a character trope that is incredibly vexing if you're not a Japanophile--and we don't create games for Japanophiles, we create games for a broad Western audience. We don't want you to have to have any prior understanding of Japan to enjoy yourself.

What are some of the most difficult tasks you have had to overcome as Localization leader?
I'd say the most challenging aspect is naming. I've mentioned this in another thread, but the localization team is in charge of naming all weapons, armor, NPCs, content name, ability names, spell names, target names, etc. etc, and it is my responsibility to make sure our proposals are sound. With weapons, armor, and NPCs there's a bit of leeway, but content and ability names in particular are quite difficult. The words need to accurately describe what the content is while also being easy enough for a Japanese player to understand. We get the naming request from the planner in charge together with a spec sheet, and spend half a a day or so coming up with upwards of twenty different suggestions. We throw about fifteen out and propose our favorites of the remainder to the devs, who have the final say. Sometimes they like it right away. Sometimes they like the meaning of the word but feel it's too long, which is why we have "Skirmish" in English but "Skirm" in Japanese. Sometimes they don't like any and it's back to the drawing board (I think it took about a week to finalize "Alluvion Skirmishes.") For an even more recent example, I spent about four hours researching waltzes to come up with "Contradance," including watching a bunch of youtube videos.

I'll lead this into another story. In Japanese, the Trust Initiative is called "Faith." We originally proposed the name "Trust," which the devs absolutely loved, but then right before QA started Japan's Prime Minister Abe gave a widely-panned speech about the Tokyo Olympics in which he used the English phrase "Trust Me"...aaand that was it for "Trust" in Japanese. They decided to go with "Faith," but when considering what the system is about (you earn the NPCs' trust--they dont put blind faith in you) we decided to keep it as "Trust" in English.