Using the enchanting table translator
Type in English and the symbols from the enchanting table appear on the right. Paste symbols from a screenshot's worth of chat into the left box and press swap to read them.
The alphabet has no capitals, so everything comes back in lowercase. Numbers and punctuation have no symbols of their own and stay as they are, which is also how the table treats them.
Four letters take more than one character. P is !¡, Y is two bars, and T and X each carry a space, so copy the whole output rather than retyping it.
The Standard Galactic Alphabet
The Standard Galactic Alphabetstringmash.com/enchanting-table-translator
Why the symbols look borrowed
Unicode never encoded the Standard Galactic Alphabet. The only formal encoding sits in the ConScript Unicode Registry, a list of made-up scripts in the Private Use Area, and it shows as empty boxes without a special font.
So people type it with lookalikes. A is ᔑ from Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, K and L are from the Vai script of Liberia, O is a monospace J from the maths alphabets, and N is the Japanese katakana リ.
That set is a community convention. This tool uses the table from the r74n converter, checked against dCode's. The two agree on every letter and differ only on where the spaces in T and X go.
Commander Keen's alphabet
Tom Hall drew the alphabet for Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons, released on 14 December 1990 by the team that became id Software. It let the game hide messages for players patient enough to decode them.
Minecraft borrowed it for the enchanting table, which arrived in 2011 with the 1.0 release. Notch's preview screenshot that October held a message for anyone who decoded it. It read WELL PLAYED INTERNETS YOU ARE GOOD, THESE NAMES WILL BE RANDOM AND CONFUSING, EACH SPELL COSTS EXPERIENCE LEVELS.
The random part stuck. The table draws three to five words from a fixed list of 62 (seven of them only in Java Edition), among them "the elder scrolls", "xyzzy" and "klaatu berata niktu", and they have nothing to do with the enchantment you get. None of the words has a J or a Q in it.
Related conversions
Runes are the real alphabet the table's look calls to mind, carved by people who used it to write their own language. Wingdings is the other famous one-for-one symbol swap, drawn for Windows 3.1 in the same years Keen was being made.
Questions
What does the enchanting table say?
Nothing meaningful. It picks three to five words at random from a fixed list, and they don't describe the enchantment. Decode them here and you'll get strings like "fire elemental grow" or "cthulhu fhtagn baguette".
Is the Standard Galactic Alphabet a real language?
No. It's a letter-for-letter substitution for English, so it has no words or grammar of its own. Anything written in it is English underneath.
Why do some letters look different on my phone?
They're borrowed from about a dozen Unicode blocks, and each system draws them with its own fonts. The shapes vary a little, but the characters are the same.
Why does the output have spaces I didn't type?
T and X each include a space. T's dot hangs below it and X's dot sits above, and a combining dot needs a character to sit on. Copy the output as a whole and the spaces take care of themselves.