I've been watching Voyager
That was your FIRST mistake.
and the question of how the universal translator works came to me. Voyager is 70K light years from the Alpha Quadrant and is thus encountering aliens that the Federation is unaware of (at least until the Borg or Q). However, Voyager's crew are able to easily communicate with these new species.
Now my understanding of the universal translator is that it only translates programmed languages. We have seen where it doesn't work with unknown aliens (TOS Arena and TNG Darmok come to mind) and even common alien languages (Klingon in ST VI, which is odd considering the crew prior to that never had any problems understanding the Klingons). If we assume this, than Voyager should not be able to communicate with these newly discovered aliens in the Delta Quadrant.
On the other hand if the universal translator acts as a sort of deciphering program of languages (e.g say based on tone) than Voyager would be able to communicate in some fashion with new species. However, I suspect that there would still be some kind of delay as translators between Voyager and the alien deciphered the language. I have not seen any kind of delay in question and response.
So that being said, what is and how does the universal translator work?
This was the first piece of data in my (as of now, sort-of-abandoned) "Cutting Room Hell" theory: that Star Trek deliberately and routinely omits HUGE chunks of time in between otherwise smooth cuts, mainly because they are boring or have nothing to do with the story itself.
Three really good examples of this:
- HAILING -
Data: "The alien vessel is approaching at one quarter impulse power."
Picard: "Hail them."
Worf: <Presses button. Beep, chirp...> "No response."
One should insert a break of, say, two or three minutes between the pressing of that button and the "No response" report. Otherwise, it seems like you're just calling the other guy and then hanging up in less time than it would physically take for THEIR communications officer to utter the words "We're being hailed." That two or three minute delay would be the tense couple of minutes where nothing happens and nobody really says anything, minutes where the captain and crew are waiting to see what's going to happen next.
- SENSOR SCANS -
Worf: "Captain! Earth!"
Data: <Presses button> "The atmosphere contains high concentrations of methane, carbon monoxide and flourine."
Picard: "Life signs?"
Data: <Presses another button> "Popularion approximately nine billion. All borg."
Even with 24th century sensors, it should take substantially more than five and a half seconds to scan an entire planet, analyze its atmospheric composition, count the number of life forms on it and then determine as a matter of fact that all nine billion of those life forms are borg. For that matter, unless Data's operations console has been programmed with the script for the movie, it's gonna take him ALOT longer than that to read all of that sensor data and find the answer to Picard's question.
So here too, we have missing time: insert, say, half an hour at least of sensor scans, maybe a probe launch or two, of Enterprise sitting there in the temporal wake trying to figure out what the hell just happened to Earth. That also adds some believability to the exposition after the fact: instead of simply pulling random information out of their asses that just happens to be exactly correct, this gives them time to spend half an hour or so thinking about it, maybe checking the library computer for similar cases to find out for sure. All of which, once again, would be boring to watch.
- FIRST CONTACT SITUATIONS -
Voyager is the worst offender by far since they are constantly running in to inexplicably hostile, mindlessly xenophobic alien-of-the-week species that they can always talk to pretty much instantly. In this case, we should precede these contact situations with an incredibly boring briefing by the ship's communications officer (whose job has become so boring that he no longer even has a bridge position) about a gamut of alien transmissions the ship has been receiving lately; the officer has traced those transmissions to their origin, identified known patterns and a few dozen known dialects and categorized them in a class based on their transfer protocols, frequency and modulation; a translation matrix has been constructed and a best-fit translation will be available in twelve hours, which will allow them to fine-tune the translators once further contact is established. The communications officer then plots a list of known transmission sources for the identified language class on a chart, which gives an estimate of the "territory" of the alien race and where they're likely to be found.
These kinds of briefings would happen probably three or four times a week on a ship like Voyager, but because they're in a hurry to get home, they don't have time to initiate the usual first-contact procedures that might involve hacking their database for cultural references, clandestine infiltration and monitoring to try and figure out exactly what kind of peaceful gesture these people would notice in order to avoid that first contact resulting in the aliens panicking and opening fire because they think they're being invaded or something. BECAUSE Voyager doesn't have time for this sort of in-depth research, they are constantly being shot at for no good reason; on the other hand, by the time they encounter the aliens for the first time they at least have a sense that they're in territory those aliens control (instead of just mindlessly blundering across somebody's border at high speed and then being all surprised when when the alien version of NORAD paints a target on your ass). It would also imply that more than half of the species their linguists analyze never encounter them at all.
All of this, of course, happens between cuts; that cute opening scene that ends with Janeway being paged to the bridge, it's actually a call for her to meet with the communications officer to tell her that they're coming up on a new group of language families and first contact is immanent. The cut where she ACTUALLY ARRIVES on the bridge is a week later when the aliens' terrified border patrol guys intercept them; the briefing scene was cut for brevity.
It would also be suggested that Cutting Room Hell actually encompasses ninety percent of what goes on aboard a starship, which is why the away missions only ever seem to involve the bridge officers. The entire rest of the crew have a shitload of other jobs to do before, during and after the away mission, so much so that each starship runs the equivalent of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory every single time they beam anyone down anywhere.
