List of Trek questions that keep us up at night

Here's one I always wondered about....

If someone on screen is contacted by someone off screen, you hear them say "Picard to Riker", but there's no way the communicator could have known who to pipe that audio through to before he said "Riker".....so is the audio time delayed until it hears the recipient? I guess it must be. I'll bet there's a scene somewhere that contradicts that though.

 

I've often wondered this too. Surely a time delay isn't the answer. Not very efficient when used in urgency

 

When the universal translator kicks in, why do people still lip synch? Shouldn't one of them look like they're in a dubbed foreign film?

 

I'm willing to give artistic license to that, although I do wonder how the translator knows to stop when someone chooses to speak in the same language.....when Picard swears in Klingon, how does the translator know not to translate that? How does the Klingon know he switched to Klingonese for that phrase?

 

In reality, the universal translator would work as we saw in Star Trek Beyond. That was a big "AT LAST!" moment for me.

 

I was going to bring that up too. It must be frustrating if you choose not speak in your listeners first language, but then it keeps getting translated to it anyway

 

You're right. In some languages for example the verb comes first and in others it comes last, so you have to wait till the sentence/proposition is finished before you can even start translating. You can only translate immediately in languages where the grammars are very similar and that shouldn't happen too often with languages from different planets.

 

And what if there's more than one person by the same name? "Picard to Ensign Frederick Albert Bergenheim, Stellar Cartography - the redhead, not the blonde."

You also need to know the context of the phrase before translating, like whether it's literal or colloquial, and allow for people who pronounce words differently...it's a mess.

 

Not unless the communicator is equipped with a time traveling device that sends these words two seconds in the past or the sender is rendered unconscious for about two seconds so th

 

What I always found odd was when you have Worf or whoever use a Klingon word or term untranslated, and then he or someone else translates it. Like in one briefing on DS9 Worf was talking about Gowron's protection service, which he identifies as "the Yanis'leth" and Dax then provides the translation "Brotherhood of the Sword." Why didn't the UT just provide "Brotherhood of the Sword" when Worf said "Yanis'leth" to begin with?

 

I'd think there'd be no Enterprise series, period. Witch Picard leaving, TNG might have stayed popular, but nowhere near as hugely popular as it was during its remaining years. The franchise might well have petered out during DS9 (a spectacular series, and my favourite but it never quite garnered the (relatively) mainstream following TNG did), and I think the chance even Voyager would have been produced would have been substantially smaller, let alone Enterprise. At least not as an automatic successor in the wake of earlier successful series, they still might have tried such a series as a reviving effort, the way TNG itself started out.

 

TNG was never "hugely " popular. It was just popular enough for casual viewers to know of patrick stewart.

 

That's why I said, relatively mainstream. Perhaps I should have added that qualifier to the 'hugely' as well, yes (or just have used another adjective). But still, my point remains that I think not all successor series would have been made (at least, not in the same fashion).

 

Curses are an interesting case, because they often don't make much sense in translation. However, I believe that there may two other factors at play, too:

1. They're speaking Federation Standard

According to The Klingon Dictionary, members of the Klingon aristocracy speak excellent Engl... I mean, Federation Standard, and it is considered a mark of a good education (just as French has long been among English-speakers, even during the Napoleonic wars).

In my head canon, the heads of most Great Houses would be proficient in FedStandard, in part due to their privileged education and in part because it is a valuable tool for leaders to have; it shows respect for the Empire's most honored ally and allows Klingon leaders to choose their words carefully, thereby giving them an advantage in diplomacy. Furthermore, it will help them to know their enemy when the peace inevitably ends.

Similarly, I would expect that captains stationed along the Klin-Fed border would speak at least decent Fedstandanto, and likewise those who took Doaege Rihanai 101 at the Academy would be favored for positions near the border with the Romulan Star Empire.

Therefore, when we see Starfleet officers interacting with Klingons, most of them are speaking Federation Standard 98% of the time, with only a handful of actual Klingonese words and expressions.

2. The universal translator's "detect language feature" lags behind

Try pasting the following text into Google Translate and set it to "Detect language":

Du är som ett tandlöst gammalt lodjur, som försöker skrämma oss med sitt vrål! Vi får väl se. Heute ist ein guter Tag zum Sterben!

You'll notice that GT translates the first two sentences quite well, but fails to make sense of the final sentence. That's because the first two are in Swedish, whereas the final sentence is German.

Specifically, this text is modeled on the conversation between Gowron and the DS9 crew towards the end of The Way of the Warrior. They say a bunch of things back and forth, and then Gowron says something in some Klingon language. The DS9 crew all turn to Worf, who explains: "He said, 'Today is a good day to die.'"

It is my sincerely held head canon that the reason the UT failed to translate the final sentence because, just like Google Translate, it was translating (or rather, abstaining from translating) the bulk of the conversation and thus wasn't set to translate Klingon.

Of course, 24th century translation technology has been shown to be far more advanced than it is now (as it should be), but one might still imagine there is some sort of "linguistic inertia", where the UT will remain set to one language it adapts to another.
Considering how the UT has been shown to be more or less magical, translating languages it's only heard a few sentences in, it's not unreasonable to think that this might be a conscious design feature, rather than a flaw. If you're a spy eavesdropping on a conversation, you might have your UT set to "Inertia OFF", so that the UT will switch languages at a moment's notice and let you hear every juicy detail in a language you understand.
However, in day-to-day situations, this might be impractical; just imagine this scenario:

"Captain, what's the French word for 'mushroom'."
"'Mushroom'."
"Oh, so it's the same as in English?"
"No, it's 'mushroom'."
"Right, so 'mushroom' is also the French word for 'mushroom'."
Picard lets off the most vile series of profanity that Riker has ever heard.
"C... Captain!"
"Forgive me, Number One, it's an old French... Oh, I see. Computer! Adjust Commander Riker's Universal Translator settings; Inertia ON!"
"Affirmative"
"Number One, the French word for 'mushroom' is 'champignon'."

I suspect this situation could be explained using the same explanation as the one above (you can try feeding GT the mostly-English sentence "He is guarded around the clock by his personal security force, die Bruderschaft des Schwertes." and see how it fares), but I believe there might be another explanation as well:

Because the Federation has known about the existence of the Yan-Isleth for a long time, the name is listed as a proper in Federation databases. As such, the UT does not deem it necessary to translate it, any more than it considers it necessary to refer to the station's CMO as "Dr. Jupiter's Bringer of Good News".

Real world examples of organization names that often go untranslated include Médecins Sans Frontières ("Doctors Without Borders", which they also go by), Knesset ("the gathering") and Luftwaffe ("the air force").

Another interesting example is Gardes de la Manche ("Guards of the Sleeve"), which was the King of France's personal guard for many centuries. Seeing as they filled a function similar to that of the Yan-Isleth, it's not unreasonable to think that the latter is also referred to by its native name.

 

Compared to the other three to come after it, that is hugely popular.

 

I know. But time to time, we get a newbie here who seemed to think TNG was as popular as Friends in the mid 1990s, or Game of Thrones in recent years.

 

Been on TrekBBS since 2000 or 2001. Just not under this account. (Lost access to my first account after an absence of 2 years and found it easier to just create a new one, since I really don't care about nonsense like post counts and such.) And I watched TNG during its initial run.

That is, in my country, so yes, it is slightly harder for me to judge exactly how popular it was in the states. In my country I would have considered it fringe-mainstream. The majority would still call you a nerd for watching it, but in a rather good-natured kind of way, and even those people often seemed to have a basic knowledge of what the show was about.

At least, those are my experiences from that time.

 

Regarding the Changelings making Odo a solid, I always thought that they were somehow able to lock his body into being human. In "THINGS PAST", Bashir discovered traces of morphogenic enzymes in Odo's cells, which was why he, Sisko, Dax, and Garak were in a form of mental link with Odo. I infer from that line of dialogue being not only how Odo was made a solid, but how the baby Changeling was able to merge with him and give him his abilities back.

 

If the Romulans use artificially produced quantum singularities as their power source for their ships, why weren't miniature black holes created when a Romulan ship was destroyed? More to the point, why did they blow up instead of being sucked into said black hole when containment was breached?

 

I know a lot of people don't like Star Trek Online, but I love how they include that detail when you destroy a Romulan ship.