Click the glyph segments to toggle. The phoneme (syllable, sound) will appear to the right of the glyph box.
Click the phoneme to clear the glyph box and record it below to build your word.
There are hotkeys for each of the glyph segments as well (1-5 vowels, "qwerty" consonants)
Huge shoutout to oposdeo on the Steam forums for providing the guide to the translation.