![]() ![]() Despite the existence of Technical Manuals and deep concept development (necessitating wikis whose servers are probably overclocking at all hours), it is not a Hard Science Fiction program. I always feel odd picking on Star Trek for the nitty gritty of technology. But if the UT is based on brain waves and/or evolving context, wouldn't the idioms themselves be translated, as our friend proved would be necessary? Not every culture would conceptualize cooperation, combat, or death in the same way. So episodes like Darmok and Nemesis make a surface-level amount of sense. We watched movies with subtitles on when she was over, and occasionally she'd ask us to pause and explain a phrase that seems so ubiquitous to us that it gave me a whole new awareness of how pervasive idioms are within a culture and language. One of our closest friends is from Brasil, and when she first moved to the United States, idioms were the most challenging part of becoming fluent in English (I will never speak down of her progress, as I am English-speaking with only the distant memories of my high school Spanish, which I never mastered to the degree she did English within just a few months of arriving). Obviously these are problematic assertions, as the UT is often employed in first contact over transmission where close scanning of the aliens' brains would likely be difficult, or seen as aggressive.īut my major problem with UTs, which I'm focused on today, are the spotty translation of idioms. It has also been suggested that it reads brainwaves and looks for "universal" patterns which can easily be used as the basis of the translation matrix. So the supposed function of the UT is that it collects recordings and begins to build a matrix and database for interpretation* of a previously unknown language. This one is the deepest, most fun language-centered episode I have yet to see in the Star Trek universe, and yet it poses the same issue for the operation of the Universal Translators. The aliens encountered by the Enterprise, Tamarians, speak entirely in Allegory. There's an amazing episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Darmok," which is famous in memes and held dear in the hearts of TNG fans. It added interest to the conversation, but raised some questions in my mind about the omnipresent Universal Translator that the Federation (and just about any alien they encounter) employs. It sounds like a homage to Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome with the inhabitants of a planet communicating in an "English" that is thick with euphemisms and idioms. Last night I was watching Star Trek: Voyager and the episode "Nemesis" came across the queue. Universal Translators, Alien Language, and Idioms
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