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"&*^^!(&%%$$#@@" says Thot Gor

That universal translator is the one thing that's bugged me about Treknology. 1st contact w/unknown species and the unknown species is speaking the king's and queen's english and understanding it-WTF?

I dunno, for starship-starship contacts, it seems appropriate, as godlike computers are trading lexicons and hashing out meanings of words.

And a lot of people decry that realtime translation isn't possible with most languages like it is in English. In all likelihood, Trek denizens, being smart cookies, have figured this out and have adopted universal auxiliary languages that are structured in order to be real-time translatable, because otherwise their their UTs won't work.

The only time the UT is really magic is when they beam down to some primitive-ass planet and are able to understand what people are saying and vice versa, despite no lexical analysis (however swift) having taken place. Sadly, this does happen a lot.
 
^ It's also magic in the fact that it sometimes doesn't seem to work at all, even for well established languages. For example when Gorwon is about to attack DS9 he speaks Klingon to Sisko, which not only sounded Klingon but wasn't translated at all by the UT. Given the way the UT is suppose to work in that while they are speaking their native tongue you hear your own, even if Gorwon were speaking "Federation standard" up to that point there should be no noticeable change to when he starts speaking Klingon and Worf shouldn't have to C-3PO it.
 
At least when I write...I'm starting to play with the idea of the translator progressively "backing off" when you put it in a special language-acquisition mode. If you want to learn someone else's language, it'll slowly take the training wheels off as you learn to speak and think in the other language. I have a character who's started to learn the Cardassian languages--and now, when it's something fairly basic, there are times when they speak to him that he hears right past the translator down to the actual words they're saying in their own language.

I like to think that maybe in the Trekiverse, Klingon is one of those well-known languages people sometimes hear in the original because they understand it directly, without translation. WE don't, of course (well, most of us), but I like to think of that as the explanation.
 
^ It's also magic in the fact that it sometimes doesn't seem to work at all, even for well established languages. For example when Gorwon is about to attack DS9 he speaks Klingon to Sisko, which not only sounded Klingon but wasn't translated at all by the UT. Given the way the UT is suppose to work in that while they are speaking their native tongue you hear your own, even if Gorwon were speaking "Federation standard" up to that point there should be no noticeable change to when he starts speaking Klingon and Worf shouldn't have to C-3PO it.

Well, yeah. You still gotta squint.
 
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