De-powering Comprehend Languages?

[Dakkareth]

I'd just have it give a bonus to the respective skills. If you want instant understanding use high-level means like universal telepathy (like many outsiders possess) to talk to people and legend lore/vision to find out the specifics of a text. This way there's some actual worth in knowing languages, even at higher levels.

 

[Davek]

I generally give the caster a word by word translation. Understanding of the writer's grammer is not included. If the writer is using a similar grammatical structure then the two messages (original and translated) will be similar, but in cases of vast grammatical differences, (such as between modern species and extinct species) only bits and pieces of the translated message would by understood. Once the reader figures out the grammar used then the message can be deciphered.

 

[Kyrail]

Exactally, the touch componant makes it useless deciphering languages of anyone but people you know very well... even friendly people aren't going to let you hold their hand while you talk to them.

 

[Someone]

I generally give the caster a word by word translation. Understanding of the writer's grammer is not included. If the writer is using a similar grammatical structure then the two messages (original and translated) will be similar, but in cases of vast grammatical differences, (such as between modern species and extinct species) only bits and pieces of the translated message would by understood. Once the reader figures out the grammar used then the message can be deciphered.

I had the same idea, that comprenhend languages work in a similar way to modern automatic translators. In that case, when you have an ancient text that it´s likely to be translated with the spell, get the text and pass it through several web translators. Here´s how Davek´s post ended after several runs:

I generally give a word to the echador by the translation of the word. The limit of the grammer of the author does not include. If the author employed his both then (at the beginning and translated) submitted a report with a similar structure of similar grammar, but when they are vast differences in grammar, (for example between the modern and extinguished types types) only the pieces of reported that by included/understood is translated. The reader calculates as soon as apart from grammar then that it it bulletin can be deciphered employed