Star Trek Ruminations

Are they really speaking English on Star Trek, or does it just appear that way for the sake of the 20th/21st century audience? We can't necessarily trust our ears, since the Universal Translator may simply be translating for us as the 20th/21st century audience.  But an exchange between Neelix and Tuvok strongly indicates that it truly is English being spoken on Starfleet ships in the 24th century. A Riddle that Solves the Riddle The episode "Riddles" (VOY) starts and ends with two alternate punchlines for the same riddle: NEELIX: Okay, here goes. A lone Ensign finds himself stranded on a class L planetoid with no rations. His only possession, a calendar. When Starfleet finds him twelve months later, he's in perfect health. Why didn't he starve to death? TUVOK: It is a theoretical possibility that such planetoids contain hot water springs, which could sustain the man for several weeks. NEELIX: But not for a whole year. TUVOK: I concur. Logic dictates that the Ensi...

I finally saw the new Star Trek movie tonight. While I take time to collect my thoughts on the new film as a whole let me comment on one little aspect of it - matters of translation. Interestingly the credits mention a Romulan and Vulcan Language Supervisor (or Consultant or some such title). However after my first viewing of the film I have to say I didn't notice any Vulcan being spoken, and I only noticed what was presumably a little Romulan shouting when Kirk and Spock beam over to Nero's ship. Perhaps there were more such moments than I realized. That being said, the basic issues of translation among alien races is acknowledged from the very beginning. From the moment Uhura is introduced to Kirk, it is clear that she is more than just a subspace-ham-radio operator. She is a linguistic expert - move over Hoshi Sato! Unlike her counterpart in the original timeline, who couldn't seem to speak Klingon if her life depended on it, this Uhura is eavesdropping on and translat...

“The Devil in the Dark” is basically the early prototype for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home . Of course, “The Devil in the Dark” doesn’t have time travel or all of the fish-out-of-water gags of the movie, but at the core these are both stories about communication—and of the conflict that can grow out of a lack of communication. In his book, I Am Spock , Leonard Nimoy makes a direct link between his fondness for this episode and his inspiration for The Voyage Home . The Horta is an interesting case study of the difficulties of translation. First, there is the mechanical hurdle—this creature has no speech organs. As Phillip Morrison indicated , in a diversely populated universe what we think of as speech can hardly be universal. We have to wonder, how quickly would we recognize intelligence and communication from totally alien life-forms? The seemingly omniscient UT simply is no match for the Horta (or the whales, or the mystery probe that came to find them). Spock makes an attempt to ...

Reflecting on the role of translation in the Star Trek movies brings us to Star Trek: Insurrection . Now in this film, translation plays no role whatsoever, and therein lies the problem. One of the difficulties of this movie is explaining the revelation that the Son'a are really the Ba'ku. This raises a lot of questions about where they got their ships, how they have represented themselves as an entire race and a force to be reckoned with, how they were able to enslave two other races and so on. I would guess they misrepresented themselves to the Federation like so many Gibeonites (see Joshuah 9:3-15), and the Federation didn't probe too deeply because of the questionable nature of the whole matter. But that simplistic explanation doesn't really account for everything. You can read a much more thorough exploration of the the Son'a problem here, along with some theories that try to explain it away. No matter how we explain their deception, it seems incredible that...

While Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country wove issues of translation and communication into the story, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home issues of translation and communication are the story. More than any of the other movies, and more than all but maybe a handful of episodes, the drama of this story grows directly out of the complexities of communicating with alien life-forms. In his book I Am Spock , Leonard Nimoy provides some insight into the creative process behind this movie. Early on he consulted with three scientists involved in the SETI program, including Philip Morrison. Morrison argued strongly that communication with an alien life form would be virtually impossible: In addition to the mechanical problems of having radically different speech organs, the thought process and shared experience from a totally alien environment and path of evolution would leave even a translated sentence incomprehensible. Of course, in the Star Trek universe we are dealing with a lot of hum...

Let us take a moment to revisit the idea of scanning brain activity to guide the translation process. I suggested that the UT may be able to detect thought patterns that correspond to certain categories of words - such as nouns, verbs, or specific kinds of nouns (people, animals, food, numbers). I recently came across an interesting book that indicates that the human brain actually does work that way. The books is Um . . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean , by Michael Erard. The book compiles historical, literary, anecdotal, and linguistic evidence that show the inner workings of the mistakes we make when speaking. In the process of studying these speech disfluencies the underlying structure of language and thought patterns begins to emerge. Erard explains: For instance, when you accidentally swap one word for another, you always choose a word of the same part of speech, which is why I heard someone say, "That's the cake on the icing" (where two ...

“ Little Green Men ” ( DS9 ) gives us insight into the Ferengi Universal Translator, and in the process illustrates some of the logistical problems with any such device. According to this episode, Ferengi have their UTs implanted in their ears. This echoes the Babel Fish of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . (There’s a slightly more serious, in-ear device in the Michael Crichton novel Timeline , although it didn’t make it into the movie.) There’s a logic to the in-ear approach that we don’t have with other incarnations of the Star Trek UT. Consider the scene in “The 37s” ( VOY ). In that scene the revived Japanese man from 1937 marvels that he is hearing everyone speak Japanese. How? Because Janeway and Kes are wearing little gold pins? How is it that there is no cacophony of overlapping voices speaking English, Japanese, Ocampa, and whatever other languages may have been represented? This is a basic flaw in the presentation of the Universal Translator. On the other hand, having th...

"We must respond personally. The Universal Translator would be recognized." - Pavel Chekov There is no doubt that this scene is mostly played for laughs, and seeing Starfleet officers frantically searching through books and speaking Klingon badly is an entertaining sight. But it's problematic if you think it through. At the same time, Chekov's statement highlights a significant issue for the Universal Translator. First, some of what makes this scene difficult to accept. To start with - and this is really just nitpicking - why does Chekov get the disembodied voice over about the UT? Wouldn't that be Uhura's line? Would a Starfleet vessel really have a library of books about the Klingon language? Would Uhura really speak Klingon so badly? Hoshi Sato was probably spinning in her grave.The Klingon translators at Kirk and McCoy's trial speak better English than she speaks Klingon. (Supposedly Nichelle Nichols objected to the scene because she believed Uhura wo...

Up to this point we have analyzed the inner workings of the Universal Translator—how pattern analysis and neural analysis might allow the device to work. Now, let’s discuss the outer workings of the device—how users would interact with it. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country does a nice job of showing translation at work, with out letting it get in the way of the story. In the process there are some scenes that illustrate the realities of using a translation device. To Subtitle, or Not to Subtitle One interesting scene starts with the Federation president communicating with Azetbur over subspace. We hear the conversation in English. When their conversation ends, Azetbur’s aide unrolls a map on her desk and begins talking to her in Klingon. We see English subtitles. Either she was actually speaking to the President in English, or we were hearing things through the President’s UT. But when the Klingons speak privately, they logically are speaking their own language. After this has ...

“Metamorphosis” (TOS) gives us another significant detail about how the Universal Translator (UT) functions: it scans brain activity. As far as I know, this concept is not mentioned in any other episode (but please correct me if I’m missing something). The idea that the UT can scan a person’s thoughts might help solve some of the translation problems based on pure pattern recognition and contextual clues . But some other problems are potentially created in the process. Universal Thought Patterns Kirk explains that there are certain universal thought patterns that the UT can detect. Is this a plausible idea? Could diverse races, with disparate nervous systems, and divergent forms of communication, have certain universal convergent brain activity? On one hand this seems hard to accept. We know, for example, the Ferengi four-lobed brain structure (as well as that of their cousins the Dopterians) is different enough that Betazoids cannot read their thoughts (except when they can ...

There are a number of episodes of Enterprise (such as “Vox Sola”) that describe the Universal Translator (UT) in terms of analyzing patterns in the spoken word. Few details are given regarding the process, but we can draw some reasonable conclusions. First, let’s start with the easiest task—translating between two known languages. There are already computer systems that can recognize written and even spoken words and translate them into other languages . While there are limitations to the accuracy of such systems, we should expect vast improvements as we enter the 22 nd – 24 th centuries. But what about a computer learning a new language through pattern recognition? This is also something that has already started to happen. Franz Josef Och , a specialist in computer translation, has developed systems that use statistical models allowing computers to learn new languages. The computer is given a document that has already been translated into two different languages. It then c...

Index of "Lost in Translation" Articles Communication with Aliens in Star Trek (this page) Verbal Pattern Analysis Scanning Brain Activity Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country "The Universal Translator Would Be Recognized" Men, Ferengi, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Lobes Um . . . Disfluencies and Translation There Be Whales Here ( Star Trek IV ) They Sure Don't Sound Like Son'a to Me ( Star Trek: Insurrection ) Horta Hears a Who ("The Devil in the Dark") Star Trek XI Also see an older post about translation in Star Trek : Musings about “Nemesis”—Part 1 of 2 (The Voyager Episode, Not the Movie) The Universal Translator is a vital piece of technology in Star Trek . Without the Universal Translator we would probably never get to the stories themselves. In his book, Aliens and Alien Societies , Stanley Schmidt writes: Any time two independently evolved species come into contact, [a writer] must decide how, if at all, they’re going to learn to talk to...

The fourth season episode of Voyager , “Nemesis”, begins with a routine shuttle-crash opening. But thereafter it introduces some innovative—albeit somewhat manipulative—storytelling. First, consider the matter of language. The Star Trek universe depends upon the existence of the universal translator. For the most part it has to function flawlessly and invisibly so as not to bog down the drama of a given episode. On a few occasions, however, we are given some hint that communication between alien cultures is not as effortless as it usually seems—that languages are not just different sets of vocabulary but different ways of thinking. “Nemesis” is one of those episodes. This episode features a human-like race called the Vori that take in Chakotay after he crash lands in their war zone. The writers succeed in making the Vori immediately comprehensible in English, but with just enough variation in the way they express themselves to convey the idea of a different language and thought patter...