#i'm not that familiar with irish culture so i don't know how actually similar they are

[sun-marie]

🖊 and Lydia!

thank you for the ask!!

While I realize it's slightly overdone/cheesy, I'm a huge sucker for the trope where the only memory a character has of their parents is them singing a lullaby. Combine that with an ocean theme and some (shaky) irish/scottish inspiration for the elves of Thedas, I imagine one of Lydia's only memories of her mother is a vague figure singing this song to her as a baby </3

Send me a “🖊+an OC“ and I will talk about that OC!

[theabstruseone]

Oh boy, the universal translators. This is hands down my favorite sci-fi tech to think about because it's a great handwave - You don't want to go through the expense of creating a fake language for every alien species on a show (particularly one with as many aliens as Star Trek) and you don't want to force actors to learn said language and have to emote while speaking it.

But the moment you think about how this technology works in-universe, it becomes this fascinating web of overlapping problems that can only be answered with out-of-universe production answers.

Why does the Universal Translator only sometimes translate Klingon? Is there something inherent in the Klingon language that makes some words and phrases untranslatable (even though they often give a precise translation immediately after)? Because the Universal Translator doesn't do that for other languages. You'll hear "Qapla'!" a dozen times an episode when Klingons are around like it's something that cannot be given shape in English, yet we never hear the Vulcan language phrase for "Live Long and Prosper". Surely if "Qapla'" has nuanced meaning in Klingon, the Vulcan word for "Logic" must have similar complex meaning.

The answer is CBS and Paramount spent a shitload of money paying Michael Okuda to make a fake language and they're going to use it damnit! Plus it sells copies of the Klingon language books they made.

But hands down my favorite question to think about is this one:

What does Worf sound like without the Universal Translator?

Worf was raised by Klingons before being adopted by humans who live in Russia. Assuming he learned Klingon as a baby, does he speak baby-talk-level babbling Klingon mixed with Russian? Or because he was raised in Minsk, is there Belarusian in there as well? Or did he learn the language with the Universal Translator on so he's speaking English?

Or what about Molly, the daughter of Miles O'Brien and Keiko Ishikawa? Is she speaking English due to the Universal Translator, or some weird mix of Irish Gaelic and Japanese (specifically the Kyushu dialect of Keiko's home in Kumamoto)?

Then there's the question of idioms and nuance. How precisely is the Universal Translator translating idioms? Sure we get a few here and there where someone has to explain some Earth culture to someone because they don't know it, but why is that only with direct references and not any of the other idiomatic language we use? Troi uses "Juliet on the Balcony" as an example of an untranslatable idiom without the cultural context in the episode "Darmok", but why is that untranslatable but "break the ice" or "catch a cold" (phrases also invented by Shakespeare) translated without issue?

Then there's nuance. If you're familiar with anime, you might understand the difference between a "translation" and a "localization" as it's a fiercely debated topic in some circles. However, there's a good example if you want to understand how nuance and cultural issues enter into a translation. If you're directly translating, the two sentences "Forgive me Father for I have sinned" and "I'm sorry Daddy I've been naughty" mean the same thing. However, there is vast differences between the two in cultural context and nuance.

How does the Universal Translator handle that? Does it somehow know how to translate those meanings precisely, even to languages it doesn't know? It's my personal headcanon that Voyager had so many issues with diplomacy in the Delta Quadrant because Janeway would say "I'm Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation ship USS Voyager. I'm with Starfleet. We're scientists, explorers, here to study and learn." and the Universal Translator is spitting out "I am Overseer Kathryn Janeway of an empire of over 100 worlds with thousands of tributaries! I am with the Imperial Military! We are here to learn all of your secrets to increase our own power!"

Of course, the actual reason for this is Star Trek is an American production produced primarily for American audiences so the characters all speak English in a vernacular that is familiar to contemporary Americans. It's easier for writers, actors, directors, editors, and the audience if everyone just speaks English and they all understand one another. Any misunderstandings come from ways we ourselves could see misunderstandings happening because it makes for better drama that way, while rare misunderstandings of idioms are for either cultural reasons or the occasional fish out of water/culture clash joke.

So with the Universal Translator, as with lots of other sci-fi tech on Star Trek, we're back around again to the old question and answer of, "How do the Heisenberg Compensators work?" "Very well, thank you for asking."

I was wondering what your thoughts about universal translators are in Star Trek? Because that’s the explanation for them being able to understand the people on whatever random planet they come across - apart from in the instances where it’s too different and doesn’t work. But then sometimes there’s times when a character speaks in another language, let’s say Klingon, and we hear the Klingon. Is it just for narrative purposes?

Thank you!

I've dealt with this problem on and off in Trek novels. (Uhura in particular is often pitched as an expert in translator tech... which makes sense.)

But obviously this would be a wildly complex technology, one really difficult to implement in even simple modes a lot of the time... and seriously difficult to make work with new species. Explaining how it could be made to function would be a whole novel's worth of work; one I'm happy to leave to someone else right now, as I've got more than enough on my plate.

Meanwhile I find its presence a useful storytelling tool that can save the writer a lot of work. (And when it breaks down, that's often useful too. I'm pretty sure I played around with that trope in Doctor's Orders.) And certainly, you can drive a plot pretty effectively, sometimes, with a normally well-behaved technology that suddenly starts misbehaving. The words "transporter malfunction" have driven a whole lot of episodes of Trek to their logical conclusions... :)

[baeddel]

have you ever read 'the wake' by paul kingsnorth? reading it rn and i thought you would find it interesting based on his made up language in the book and yr interest/knowledge of old english stuff. there's more to the book than just that i believe (im interested in like..the traditional ethos of the novel which may or may not be mildly satirical as well) but wow the language is what rlly makes this book standout. dont know how actually accurate to old english grammatical structure it is (from what I know of OE..no? but i know v little im more familiar w middle onwards)

finny!! i MISS you on my dashboard 😭 i think, 'curse him for running off to flourish, succeed and find satisfaction elsewhere, instead of staying here to tell the world what it needs to know about Arthur and Iseult of the White Hands'

no i never read it. sounds interesting from your description :O i will go look it over later and tell you what i think. when i looked up the author his wikipedia page is already purple, so i guess i read about him already, but i don't remember at all... he was apparently a radical ecology activist guy from England, who then became involved in Indonesian politics to support the Papua and West Papua successionist cause, and was accepted into the Lani tribe in 2001. twenty years later he moves to Ireland, converts to Catholicism and is now an anti-vaxxer. he writes your book in the intervening time. hell of a guy... they sure don't make 'em like that very often... anyway, 'the wake' as a title perhaps presages the sojourn to Ireland. what an enormous part of our culture—not just the wake, but funerals in general. they last all day. you turn up at the house to see the body, then you go to the church for a long service, then you go bury the body, then you go back to the church to eat, and then you go clubbing, or they rent a hotel for a big party. Irish families are enormous, so you have to go to lots every year, and they're awful. no family gets along, but always has feuds, and some uncle on one side is 'connected' and starts to threaten the others, and your aunt, maternally, blames him for your cousin's suicide, and everyone sets it aside to endure the service and then, after the drink, says enough is enough. so every funeral threatens to become one or two more. well that was my experience, but i wonder if it won't be true for very long. a little while ago i wrote about how large, multi-generational families were actually common in Ireland (which is, despite popular belief, almost never true), because post-Famine and Land War chaos it was necessary to consolidate families and so forth. and Ireland had a bit of an aging population, since younger ones tended to emigrate. but by the end of the 20thc century the nuclear family took over as the predominant mode (Palestine went through a similar transformation in the same century, first to and then from the extended family), and in the 21st century emigration has slowed while immigration has increased, reversing that trend. this means that there was a time, perhaps beginning with my grandfather's generation, the same generation as Seamus Heaney and Dave Allen, and lasting into my childhood, where you had lots and lots of old relatives who, by their nature, often died, meaning that you could regularly expect the deaths of important patriarchs, the reorganization of your feuding family, all announced by an enormous, all-day family gathering. if you go and read Heaney or listen to Allen they go on and on and on about funerals. so i have a shared context with them, about how important, and tedious, and frightening funerals are, but that shared context might disappear in the next generation or the next one after them. anyway, i'm thinking about it because they were also very important to Anglo-Saxons—Beowulf for example is organized around not just three fights, but also three funerals—and i have heard about a book which argues the poem contains a secret, hidden fourth funeral! and they are likewise tremendously important for Anglo-Saxonists, as all burials are to all historians and archeologists, being sometimes all that gets preserved. anyway, Finny, here's to your health...