One giant massive hole in ME (in general) that really bugs me.

Sure. There's a lot of stuff we have to take for granted when playing a game, like (in random order)...

• Most of the other races look human.
• Mass Effect effect.
• Cerberus, a fringe human-only organization, has unlimited funds and power rivaling the rest of the galaxy combined.
  
• In ME2, Shepard can only use certain weapons. Then, in the Collector mission, she gets extra weapon training. This extra weapon training consists in its entirety of bending down and picking up a new weapon. She can now use it because she picked it up.
• Synthesis.
  

And so on. Simultaneous universal English translation may be a bit unrealistic, but I can totally get behind that. If I didn't, I feel like I'd go crazy with the rest of this stuff.

It is addressed in-game, as far as I remember.

FemShepard talks about her translator malfunctioning when Thane says "Siha" - and my best guess is that translators work in a way of providing even analogies in wearer's native language. That would actually explain stuff like "villains and stuff named with human terminology" - it can be called like some old turian deity for turians, but translator gave us closest analogy.
Siha simply had no entry in thesaurus and no possible synonyms.
So, if native language for our protag is English we hear everything in English.

About letters - it can go through auto-translate process, final language depending on your terminal system's language.

Things like banners on Citadel, writings on walls (quarian ships and literally everywhere) are clearly NOT in English - and our translators aren't able to process it, so we see it as it is.

And yeah, creators mentioned about us understanding species of Andromeda will be addressed in-game.

Lip-sync is another thing, but I agree, that not having them sync with English phrases would be hella distracting.

I ... never paid attention to that.
Good to know.

It would make for some amusing moments if they could at least show what would happen if the translator malfunctioned.

Ah, but they had potatoes to eat out of toilets:

I agree with you. I remember watching a conference and the translator was working in near-realtime.
So having a technology which do that on ME universe isn't crazy.

Now how you will communicate with new species on Andromeda universe is unknown and I ask about it on twitter and they said they discussed it in the game.

It's pretty much the oldest Science Fiction trope in the world, and just something that's kind of accepted I guess.

Universal translator theory is shonky as fuck, but it's a universally accepted shonkiness so it's nice like that lol



This kind of butt talk has nearly triggered a last playthrough (I only just did one in December too, thirst is real) 

We have definitely heard from Bioware that the language issue will be addressed in MEA. So there will be an in-game explanation, which is cool.

We know that the Prothean VI's on Ilos and Thessia were able to assimilate and translate the language after just a few sentences and we know that there are other language translator programs such as the one Javik said he could provide (used for inducting slave races into the Prothean empire).

As has been said, though, the fine detail with respect to lip-synch, delay, or the actual feasibility of having a translation of every word in the language based on a few sentences sample size can be glossed over. Every Sci-Fi show does it. I'd call it artistic license!

Liked it in KOTor, SWTOR and Jade Empire, but do not mind the space translators either in ME verse.

They mentioned Hyperion arriving late, so it's possible that the other pathfinder teams already started the job of both understanding their languages and making sure they understand ours languages.

But yeah it would be nice if we had some work os decifring but  so far they didn't talk about anyone on the pathfinder team (either crew or squad) who specialize on linguistics, if they did i would be more inclined to believe on that possibility.