OK, how does the Universal Translator work?

[lawman]

When you put it that way, it starts to sound like an almost irresistible story idea!...

A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. "Woman invents thing and men don't take her seriously" doesn't really cut it.

Getting a whole story out of what I wrote so far would be like extrapolating Journey to Babel out of "Kirk meets Spock's Dad, and they go do a thing."

C'mon, take a compliment already. Especially with a smiley attached!

I didn't take what you wrote as a complete plot summary, after all. But you deftly sketched what sounded like an interestingly obsessive inventor... and it prompts one to imagine more about amusing interactions with the stodgy tribunal members, surprising incidents during field-testing of the doors, and the final satisfying triumph over the naysayers that comes with widespread adoption!

There's a story in there, I tell you! I mean c'mon, if Sorkin and Fincher could wring a gripping, award-winning movie out of the founding of Facebook (!), anything's possible...

 

[Idran]

I think she might have thought you were pointing out how story ideas aren't allowed in this forum.

(And on that note: don't forget that story ideas aren't allowed in this forum, lawman. )

 

[Unimatrix Q]

I wonder how it could translate the single words of the Tamarian Language and not the meaning behind them. If it couldn't analyze the brain structure of them, how was it possible for the UT to translate the words?
The only possibility that i could see, is the words of their language have a nontamarian origin!

 

[Kilana2]

I wonder how it could translate the single words of the Tamarian Language.

I don't know about that, but I think Voyager's Dr. Sharak learned to speak Federation standard quite well. He even teaches Sam Wildman a bit Tamarian....

From all I heard it is generally difficult for Tamarians to learn foreign languages.

 

[Unimatrix Q]

I wonder how it could translate the single words of the Tamarian Language.

I don't know about that, but I think Voyager's Dr. Sharak learned to speak Federation standard quite well. He even teaches Sam Wildman a bit Tamarian....

From all I heard it is generally difficult for Tamarians to learn foreign languages.

I really like the new Voyager Novels and the introduction of Dr. Sharak! The conversation with his also tamarian friend was great!

 

[ElOchentero]

I always felt that the Star Trek UT worked directly with the brainwaves. It was similar to Farscape’s translator microbes, it make you FEEL that the other person was speaking in your language. This is actually shown in an episode of Discovery, we hear the Klingon speaking in Klingon with subtitles and once the UT is activated we hear them in English (or whatever human languages is the dub), the Klingon even says “I did not expected you to speak Klingon” and Michael says it is the translator. This would also explain why a Japanese heard people speaking in Japanese in “The 37” and how Picard and Data are capable of going undercover as Romulans into Romulus itself. You don’t really hear anything over the other person’s voice, you hear the person’s voice in your language because the trick is that your brain itself changes the meaning inside your head.


Of course, this doesn’t explains the lip-sync, technically that should still be an issue. But everyone who has seen a dubbed movie (and I don’t mean the terrible bad old times dub of Asian martial art films, but the careful quality dubbing you can see in Western media like between Spanish, English and French) your mind ignores the lack of sync. I guess it could be handwave that unless the language is too different and it takes you a lot of time to say one word your mind just overlooks the lack of sync like watching a dubbed film.

 

[rahullak]

I don't know if it is even possible for a UT to work without a common reference subject (visual cue etc.) between two languages. Tools like Google Translate work because the engine behind it is trained using supervised Machine Learning and sets of documents in both languages. If you just had text (however large) in only one unknown language and expected a system to automatically translate that into any other known language, I just don't know if the laws of physics and information allow that.