My understanding is that everything is “translated” for us, readers, but is in the local language.
Remember in chapter one when she asks her sister for a book? It is displayed as 『本』 to make us understand that she is actually saying the Japanese word instead of the local one.
Here, she is asking the merchant not because she does not recognize the book as such but because she wants to know the local word.
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Ahh, I completely forgot about that! I actually have no memory of this line at all, which is kind of worrisome:
どうやらマインの記憶にない言葉は日本語の発音になってしまうようで
So that clears up a lot of stuff here. She is literally learning new vocabulary that, even though Urano would have known, Mayne has never heard before so she only knows the Japanese version. This also explains why she wrote her story in Japanese when she first got her clay tablets to work.
Alright, mystery solved; thank you everyone for the input!
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I never expected people to start researching and talking about how the alphabet works in a fiction story. It was interesting.
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I am doing a bachelor’s degree project in Japanese next semester and I asked my teacher if I could do an analysis of fictional writing systems in Japanese prose fiction 
She really liked the idea, but she couldn’t find any related studies at all and though it would be too difficult to start from scratch
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good luck with that. If you speak about light novel you can talk about isekai thingy. You can also check Murakami Haruki’s books but he is more the exception than the norm
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Would be a fun project, but she recommended I think of something else
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Just finished up the last chapter so I’m all caught up now 
This last one (where she’s trying to make ink) ended up being kind of fun because it was the first time I’ve actually thought of the solution before the book presents it. I remember learning about lampblack ages ago and as soon as it was established that ink was very expensive, I immediately thought “well if I were in this situation I would know exactly what to do”.
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Impressive. I had basically no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t understand any of the 繊維 stuff from earlier either. I understood all the words and all that, but I don’t think I would understand the process even if it was explained in English.
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Just a case of random specialized knowledge that happened to sink in and stick around, haha. Lampblack was used at least in the American colonies until I guess the late 1600s/early 1700s? It was replaced by iron gall ink before the Declaration of Independence was written (learned that one from National Treasure). It gets its name from literally being made from soot produced by oil lamps or candles.
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