Languages like say Mayan, or Egyptian Hieroglyphics, how do people look at them and decipher them into, say English, so that we can understand them?
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This is the result of some very dedicated work by archeologists and linguists. Most languages are related to each other. And we have studied these long enough that we know most of the rules of how a language changes. We do not know the direction but usually a word will only have a few different ways it can change linguistically. So if we have a word we can fairly accurately guess how that used to be pronounced. And we can correct those guesses by looking at other languages derived from the same source but have developed in a different direction. We also have lots of text written in these languages and they have similarly been puzzled together with the written languages we have today. In some cases we even have text books used in schools to teach kids and grownups alike to read, write and spell. The texts also includes word play and puns which we can use to confirm our understanding of the language.
In the case of Egyptian there is one language still used called Coptic which is very similar to ancient Egyptian. The Egyptian empire lasted all the way to the rise of the Greek city states so we have lots of Greek and Egyptian texts from that period which we can use to piece together the language. Mayan on the other hand is not that ancient. When the Europeans arrived in America there were millions of people speaking Mayan and related languages. So we were able to study these languages in full. And there are still about 6 million people speaking a Mayan language.
In the specific case of Hieroglyphics, translating them was a mystery until the Rosetta Stone was found, which was a proclamation from the Ptolemaic Dynasty written in three languages; Hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek. Because Greek was known, the other two languages could be deciphered, hence why the language is known today.
In the case of the Maya languages; some of the Spanish Conquistadores learned the script directly from the surviving Maya peoples after their political collapse, and much of the Maya languages are still spoken today in rural Central America.
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