I've been reading up on rom translating and I know that tables are required (I've done my share of hex editing with FF6 and know tables are used).

My question is rather simple, which tool is used for translating best?
I'm considering the program "Xlate" but it's old and maybe over the last 11 years (It came out in 1997) there have been other translating programs.
I'm looking for the easiest, most efficiant program to use.

I translating a SNES game if that matters.

If you plan to do a large scale translation, you'll want to dump the script. As Dragonsbrethren already said, romjuice will work for this. (I, too, have seen many a complaint about romjuice yet have never had a problem with it.)

If you're only wanting to do a small translation, menus and the like, you won't need to dump the script, you can edit it directly in a hex editor. Windhex is probably the best option in that regard.

As for making tables, you'll need a relative search utility of some sort to locate the text. If you're planning to translate from Japanese (or any language that uses characters other than the standard characters found in the English alphabet) you'll want to use the Value Scan Relative feature found in Translhextion. (Don't use it's hex editing capabilities, however, as they're quite subpar these days.) If you're translating from English, you might check out Monkey Moore, a new relative search utility that has excellent speed & results.

The actual creation of a table doesn't require any special tools, just a text editor. It's a good idea to make your first table entirely by hand, that way you know exactly what you're working with. If you choose to use a table creation utility, just try the various programs and see which one feels most intuitive to you. I'm partial to Table Auto-Generator, having wrote it myself to work the way I feel a table maker should work, but the end results are the same regardless of utility.

I started ROM hacking in 1998 and XLate was considered obsolete at that point, so I'd really recommend not even attempting to use it. I've toyed with the idea of doing a minor translation using only the tools that existed prior to SnowBro's emergence, but I haven't gotten quite that bored yet.