I was wondering to what extent you think we are to interpret the books in-game as being "translated" from an original, and whether you think the meaning could be obscured because of that. We do of course have examples such as Dwemeris where the difficulty (or impossibility) of translation is explicitly stated and as a result we end up with fragmented and awkward texts, and there are cases of ancient texts which, while understood by modern scholars, have physically decayed over time and are thus still imperfect translations. But these are explicit cases of difficulty in understanding, and I was wondering if you think that many of the works we can read in the games should be implicitly interpreted as coming from another language.

It is possible (but boring and thus wrong) that there is such a language or dialect as Tamrielic, which arose during the third era and gradually replaced or existed alongside all existing tongues, and this is what we hear when NPCs gossip or command the hero, and that the majority of books available have been translated into this, or that the player is assumed to be knowledgable enough in a region's traditional language (be it Chimeris, Nordic, or whatever) to understand most random works lying around.

However, I like the idea that the player only speaks Cyrodiilic (for the sake of consistency) and, while this is the dominant language in Tamriel, and is well-known enough by most to be used when addressing someone who is obviously an outlander, is still distinct enough from Dunmer, old Nordic or Iliac Bay languages to require a translation into Cyrodiilic.

For example, are the 36 lessons obfuscated further by the player using an invisible Chimeris "language stat" to make them into English (or whatever localization the game is in) which represents Cyrodiilic? Or has the temple attempted to translate them to be more "welcoming" to outlanders? Is it a mixture of the two? And what if one roleplays a character that comes from a far more traditional, non-Imperial background of their province, and would not typically be gifted in either the local dialect or central Imperial tongue?

Would it detract from or add to the lore to assume that older, or more foreign, texts are always being confused (to a varying extent) by language difficulties?

Tamrielic (the language) was adopted as a secondary (or even primary) language in most of the empire surprisingly early. I would not be surprised to learn that the 36 lessons were originally written in Tamrielic. It is well established, for example, that Dunmeris is used in a pidgin language that uses Cyrodiilic words as the main language in Morrowind. Any examples of books being written in solely traditional languages after the 1st Era would be practically unheard of from what I gather, and the few examples we have are written in languages that are well understood and have completely satisfactory replacement words in other languages. A VERY CRITICAL POINT is that EVERY language in Tamriel (except Jel) has the same root language, Ehlnofex, so there are no "incomparable languages" like in our world where there were strict cultural divisions, translations are very straightforward and express the meaning very well once you know the language.

Also, someone else is going to bring up the very obvious fact that everything has to be seen in the context of the fictional status of the world, even if realistically the book SHOULD have been written in a different language, Bethesda wrote exactly the intended meaning in Tamrielic originally, so no translation problems will exist unless they were intended.

That's particularly interesting, and shows I should have read up more on this topic. As a minor nitpick, I doubt that a native Argonian language would be as Ehlnofex-rooted as mer or mannish tongues. And do not distinctions in names, and words that are left untranslated (N'wah etc) give hints as to wide distinctions between languages? Or do these just hint at diversions within diversions within each province? I suppose cases of popular languages which are definitely older than Tamrielic (Ashlander, for one) do not often have a tradition of writing, and it makes sense for scholars to translate all available text into Tamrielic. Having a common root will usually result in the overall structure of a language being similar, I guess. But I rather like the idea of the translation of ancient or religious texts being subject to a lot of heated debate - and for mages and so on to choose more esoteric or expressive languages in order to, at the very least, define themselves seperately from the common rabble.

It's true that "real" language (whatever we are reading it in) is ambiguous enough so that we don't actually need to note translation as a source of error - in many cases there are several meanings within a single text which can conflict to the point of suggesting multiple interpretations on the part of the author(s) or keepers of the story. We perhaps don't even need to introduce imperfect translations where they're not noted, since that can result in destruction of meaning just as often as creation of "meaning" with no logical basis.

That's the Jel language I mentioned as an exception. If we really want to get technical, there are a few other exceptions (such as Dragon). Furthermore, N'Wah is a colloquialism with a specific cultural meaning, it expresses a meaning that can be easily translated, however other cultures have no need of a one word equivalent (another example in Dunmeris is titles such as sera and serjo). Where it would be a real problem would be in cultures where their language was not correctly assimilated into scholarly knowledge (Dwemer and Falmer being the obvious examples).