I would like an option to replace a word with our personal translation of it
I actually really liked it as it was. That's certainly an immensely helpful tool in many games (Senaar, Heaven's Vault, Epigraph), but those differ from this one in a few ways. First, those have entire grammatical structures to parse, and this one is only the vocabulary, embedded in English; second, in all of those you're annotating rather than outright replacing. (I think that was true in Senaar?)
In this case, though, the first third of the game was spent switching back and forth to my notes going "talo, talo, oh, right, that means that, so ok, back to the text...", and by the last third of the game I was reading the text without notes and talking back to it: "mmhmm, right, right, of course you don't respect the beelon, I--hey! That's your leevaith you're writing to! Show some respect for her oleth!" I thought it really helped the immersion that you're absorbing the language.
Anyway, just an alternate take on the mechanic. :-)