Front matter liquid processing without filters

What I want to do is process things like the page.title* or page.description and then pass them down to a layout. Since yml front matter won’t accept {{ variables }} or liquid, there are options like flatify (which I hope is still that easy to implement) or liquefy, etc. My question is for anyone who has attempted these things: Can one go one step further and just assign to the page.variable (or layout or whatever) directly so that the layout doesn’t need to know that it has to flatify that particular variable because it’s been modified?

* for instance, I have a data file with translations of the names of a particular set of pages and I’d like to be able to retrieve the translations (if they exist for that particular page) and add the translation to the page title.

It would be easier for you to use a plugin created for translating pages: GitHub - untra/polyglot: 🔤 Multilingual and i18n support tool for Jekyll Blogs.

Interesting, and I may use that someday, but the language/translation thing is just an example of a data file driven element to modify page or layout variables that it would be lovely to be able to do.