In games I've played in Language skills have either been a burden or they have seen no use.  At their best we've just ended up with something like "Ok, Jim's character is translating everything.  Here's what the guy says."  Sometimes there might even be a "Jim, if you want to change the translation at any point just say so."

By and large, however, Language skills haven't added fun or flavor to my games.  What are your experiences like?  Got a story of when Language skills were working really well in one of your games?

What I've done in the past. The character that has the skill, Is successful in the skill roll (or whatever the mechanic is for it in the game). I tell them and its up to them to tell the group. So he may add his own interpretetation to it. Sometimes it can end up a little like the telephone game. Which is fun. In the same vein if the group I'm with is capable of not metagaming (something I dont have to worry about anymore. Yeah me!) then I give the player that can read/speak the language a sheet of paper with what is said. Then just say to the group that you hear whoever speaking in a language that you do not understand.

I've had a couple of run ins with a language skill.

I played with Joewolz for a bit, which was good times, and he ran a Ravenloft D&D 3.0 game. In Ravenloft, I think, there is no 'Common' language so the best you'll do is taking a language from an influential nation. Still, the translation issue would of been mostly a pain in the ass, and we were from the largest of nations anyhow, so I don't believe it ever became an issue.

We also played a Terra Primate game that ran all across Europe with us as G.I.s. We'd run across people whose language we didn't understand from time to time, so gameplay kind of turned into charades every know and again which was pretty funny. Still, that was something.

There's a difference between not being able to read a language and not being able to speak one. We wandered into a village being unable to communicate with the locals, which made me feel pretty damn foriegn.

In many of the games I run, languages come up either in the 'translation' context (which I rarely have a problem with) or in the 'I need to read that' context. The latter of the two is the most useful, though of the skills that I encounter, it's also the most likely to be outsourced to a scholerly NPC. More then anything, reading languages is an issue of time, unless what you're trying to read can't be shipped back.

There is a problem with many language skills, and also with character sheets for them. For example, a pretty good one was MERP. You could buy languages up individually - from beginning level to better then native. You didn't even start at your own language at the highest rank.

The other end of that spectrum is D&D and White Wolf which suffer from the Language Lightswitch issue. It's either on or off, which isn't huge, but they're not expensive or hard to pick up. In WW, you just spend 3 exp. and you've got a language. Spend 5 more, and you can read or write 7. It's worth it to do, just because it might come up and it's so simple. And even though everything else is used with a dicepool, you never need to roll to see if you can follow a discussion, so languages seem poorly done. D&D doesn't get off any easier, though. Not only do you have the same issue with the system, but the value of languages varies in extreme. If you're a Fighter, it's going to be a huge struggle to learn languages, even though it makes sense for a soldier in the field to be able to do so. It's even easier for the Rogue to do it then the Wizard, when I doubt either should really have the head up on the other.

Well, I could go on, but that way seems built for ease rather then a unified system.

I always make whatever is the second most common language French. Then, whenever someone talks in that language, I say whatever they just said in French. I translate only if they've got the language skills. I make the third most common language Attic Greek, and the fourth Mandarin, and the fifth Standard Arabic, and so on, descending as my levels of familiarity do. Most of my PCs understand a bit of French, so they know that I'm talking about say, danger nearby or something - it's not total gibberish - but only one other guy is anything but a monoglot, and our languages don't overlap except for English and Greek. It works really well in play the few times I've done it.

I ran a Shadowrun game where the PCs moved to Portugal for a while. The group had trouble finding jobs at first, depending on language chips and English-speaking contacts, but several of them ended up buying the Portuguese language as a skill. This was also reflected in their day-to-day dealings: locals were friendlier when the PCs made an effort to speak in their language.