Burning Questions Dept.: So, the Star Trek universal translator. How does it know which words to let through untranslated? People who use bons mots from other languages as conversational spices (or to illustrate a point, like the Lithuanian basketball status earlier), do they have their speech given the Babelfish treatment? How about words that get severely garbled in translation because theres no real equivalent in the destination language? Theres plenty of that here on Earth (which is how loanwords tend to happen), I can only imagine what its like for languages forged and tailored to the people on Bajor or QonoS. Speaking of lost-in-translation problems, did the Borg have to assimilate a universal translator? And if so, how the hell did the hive mind communicate within itself beforehand? Im picturing the Borg Queen looking around the universe, seeing some culture invent that concept for the first time either as a machine or a telepathic ability that could be encoded into drone brain function by the nanobots, and being like oh hell yes, send in the cubes! And thats before we even consider how Treks handwave of language pretty much drops its pants and shits on the Sapir-Whorf (Worf? Whats he got to do with this?) Hypothesis.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 10:22:39 +0000
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