I didn’t play that game. What kind of system did they have?
At first you wouldn’t understand anything they say, but the more you interact with them, the more and more words get ’’unlocked’’, thus automatically translated. Let’s say we have an alien race that speaks German.
Alien: ’’Mein Hund ist hässlich.’’
And you, if you’ve unlocked the word Hund already, would get
’’Mein dog ist hässlich.’’
Meaning that at first you wouldn’t be able to understand them at all, but the more you’d discover about them and the more effort you’d put in it, the more legible would the conversation be. It’s a nice way of simulating learning a language without the player actually having to learn the language.