The Universal Translator vs. Many Cultures, Many Languages

[Darth Wong]

It really does make you wonder why they bother with those oh-so-dramatic Vulcan mind-melds to extract information from people when they have handheld mind reading devices.

At least in Star Wars, it's implied that a largely standardized language has been adopted galaxy wide for most matters of commerce and interstellar dealings. The Star Trek UT is written so inconsistently that it really is just a plot device; there is nothing resembling a rational description of exactly what it does, never mind how it works.

[Kotooshu]

One StarTrek episode that did delve into this a little was the whole Darmok and Gilad at Tanagra thing, where Picard is trapped on a planet with an alien from a race who speak purely in metafors taken from their culture's mythology. Picard finally "cracks the code" and upon returning to the Enterprise, douses a potentially hostile situation with his new communication skills.

I remember him saying to the Alien, "I can understand the words but not the meaning"... so the Universal Translator obviously does have limits.

Incidentally, this Episode remained in my mind for two other reasons: Firsto of all, I believe it's the first episode where we see Picards fashionable vest with the grey undershirt. Very stylish.

Secondly, Picard recounts to the alien the Epic of Gilgamesh, of which I hadn't heard until then and which still fascinates me to this day.

[frogcurry]

The easy solution to some of the issues here is that all aliens have simultaneously invented universal translators that translate their thought patterns into a universal, non-species specific structure, something that is based on a fundamental value and not something variable (i.e. something equivalent to the speed of light in terms of its universality).

This idea of course, takes Occams Razor, drags into the alleyway, and sodomises it with a Dyson vacuum. But it WORKS.

[Batman]

Too bad the UT also works on primitive species nobody's ever met before.
Also there is no such thing as a fundamental value where language is concerned. I can right now give you three different values for the speed of light using current units alone and that's from one language on one planet. While c is a constant the units used to measure it aren't, nor is it being called 'c'.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

There was a species in DS9, a bunch of nomads that thought that Bajor was their mythical 'promised land', Kentanna. It took a long time for the universal translator to get to grips with the alien language.

[Mark S]

Yes..."duh". Congratulations, you've just bumped into the limits of TV SF. Laboured, delayed translation may work in a movie, or if it's doen rarely, but in a TV series it would get very old and very dull very fast. Unless you prefer to spend half the episode waiting for a translation.

Star Wars "did it better" (how exactly ? It's not like we haven't heard alien langauges in ST and pretty much everyone in SW speaks English...) because it was a *movie*. Simple as that. It could afford to show the aliens speaking their own langauge because it didn't have to revisit these aliens week after week.

I guess we'll see when that Star Wars tv show comes out.

[Darth Wong]

The easy solution to some of the issues here is that all aliens have simultaneously invented universal translators that translate their thought patterns into a universal, non-species specific structure, something that is based on a fundamental value and not something variable (i.e. something equivalent to the speed of light in terms of its universality).

This idea of course, takes Occams Razor, drags into the alleyway, and sodomises it with a Dyson vacuum. But it WORKS.

It's easier to imagine that many languages are actually related in vocabulary and syntactical structure to languages that are already in the database. Alternatively, one might suppose that decades or centuries of prior visitation had allowed researchers to add local languages into the database.

Given that Hoshi can apparently pick up an alien language in one day with no UT to help her, the Feds appear to have super-language people who are just incredibly good at picking up languages, and we already know that they periodically visit even the most primitive planets for research purposes.

As for species that we know they've never encountered before, it may be that their language is similar to something that has been encountered before, due to cultural pollution as a result of heavy space travel in the past (or that, alternatively, these other creatures also have Hoshi's supernatural linguistic ability).