How does it work?
The Universal Translator
- Thread starter Kate Nichols
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Like a dream! (See Heisenberg Compensator. )
It works by understanding basic concepts in all languages, converting them, and lipsyncing video.
In other words, magic.
A real life example of how difficult translation is, the Soviet spacenames Vostok, Voskhod and Zarya are usually translated as East, Sunrise and Dawn, but they're differently emphasised synonyms: The Sun rises at dawn in the east.
In other words, magic.
A real life example of how difficult translation is, the Soviet spacenames Vostok, Voskhod and Zarya are usually translated as East, Sunrise and Dawn, but they're differently emphasised synonyms: The Sun rises at dawn in the east.
I imagine that they wear a device wherein all languages are translated I to English and vice versa.
In Spanish, "papa" can mean either "Father" or "potato" (depending upon which syllable you accent).
On the other hand, the human mind is a wonderful tool for self-deception. It for exmalpe is etxrelmey fulent in dehicpreing nosnesne like tihs at a galnce, quite possibly finding nothing wrong with it as a first approximation. So the stuff the UT puts out need not be of particularly high quality, and the message received need not exactly be the message sent, for the end result to nevertheless be the observed one. Nuances... are gained in translation, in equal amount to nuances lost.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
There was a thread about the Universal Translator a few months ago in TNG: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/how...hout-prior-contact-to-species-language.300783
As depicted in TOS, the portable UT device performs scan brain waves to detect concepts that are supposedly universal to all intelligent life.
Later on, ENT depicted an earlier and presumably more primitive version that was programmed with hundreds of languages, and was able to learn new ones, and apparently did machine translation based on that database.
Kor
As depicted in TOS, the portable UT device performs scan brain waves to detect concepts that are supposedly universal to all intelligent life.
Later on, ENT depicted an earlier and presumably more primitive version that was programmed with hundreds of languages, and was able to learn new ones, and apparently did machine translation based on that database.
Kor
If we knew how it worked, we would already be mass-producing it, wouldn't we ? (It would be incredibly useful, after all ...)
Same for warp drive, replicators, phasers, forcefields, etc.
Same for warp drive, replicators, phasers, forcefields, etc.
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