You really believe that everyone in Starfleet learns English? I... emphatically do not interpret the universe that way. :-) I could certainly buy that- say, in the case of Metamorphosis- everyone present was speaking English. But the idea that all Starfleet officers do seems unnecessary (given the existence of the UT; certainly, yes, as a redundancy in case it fails, but Trek famously doesn't consider real-world redundancies like that), and needlessly culturally-imperialistic, for the future Star Trek is portraying. Especially when we have seen the UT applied in situations like The 37s and Little Green Men to apparently be the default, always-on system by which communication is managed in the 24th century. (The 23rd, I would entertain debate on...)
Star Trek The Motion Picture 45th Anniversary Book Club
- Thread starter Tallguy
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As I said, it would be unfeasible to expect a crew in crisis situations to rely entirely on slow, imperfect machine translation that might break down while the ship is under attack or under the influence of some weird space phenomenon. Military officers would naturally be trained to do their jobs without complete dependence on technology, and that obviously means that they would learn some common language. This should go without saying. It just happens to be English in the case of Star Trek, because we've been told outright in explicit dialogue on multiple occasions that it is English. It astonishes me that this is even a debate.
"Unnecessary?" What a strange thing to say. Most people on the planet Earth today speak more than one language. That is the norm, not the exception. Throughout history, it has always been normal for people in multicultural societies to speak at least two languages, their own local language and the shared common tongue that allows mutual comprehension with people from other communities. For instance, Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic as his native language and Greek as the lingua franca of the Eastern Roman Empire, which is why the New Testament was written in Greek, for the comprehension of as many people as possible. ("Jesus Christ" is itself a Greek translation of "Yeshua the Messiah.")
In the present day, English is the accepted international language of space travel, science, engineering, and commerce. Since Star Trek depicts a future where human interstellar civilization grows out of 20th- and 21st-century spaceflight, it follows logically that English would remain the common language of Starfleet, as we have been explicitly told that it is. That does not mean, as you somehow seem to be assuming, that other languages would cease to exist or that people would exclusively speak English. As I've been trying to tell you, that is not how common languages work. A common language is a way for people who speak different languages to understand each other without having to rely on the imperfections and delays of translation (human- or machine-mediated).
Once again, you're conflating two entirely different subjects, whether Starfleet personnel would learn English to communicate among themselves and whether they would use translators to communicate with others. Obviously translators do have their uses, in cases of interaction with people who don't already know English. It makes sense that people on away missions would have their translators turned on by default so that outsiders could understand them. But as I've explained, it would be absolutely idiotic for Starfleet personnel to depend on machine translation as a matter of routine communication with their own crewmates aboard ship.
It's like transporters -- it makes sense to use them to travel from the ship to a planet surface or another ship, but it would make no sense to build a ship where there were no doors or corridors and transporters were the only way to get from room to room. The fact that a technology is useful in some contexts does not require it to be used in every context, especially contexts where the crew would be helpless if the technology they were dependent on were to fail, as technology on starships frequently does in crisis situations. Technology exists to supplement a crew's own abilities, not to do basic jobs for them and leave them weak and helpless.
I always found "Little Green Men" ridiculous in claiming that the Ferengi characters on DS9 relied on translators by default, rather than learning the dominant language of the Starfleet personnel who'd been running the station for years. As I said, the fictional conceit that machine translation is instantaneous and absolutely perfect makes no sense if you apply any informed thought to it, because language just does not work that way. No machine translation would ever be as quick or reliable as actually speaking the language. I can accept a work of fiction glossing over the flaws in machine translation as a dramatic convenience, but claiming that those flaws do not exist and it's actually preferable to rely on machine translation rather than learning another language is just not something I can suspend disbelief about.
True. But this is because we don't have universal translator technology. :-) The speaking of multiple languages has usually been treated as a niche interest in Star Trek (except for Klingon, which seems to be a popular past time for everyone *but* the communications officer, if Star Trek VI is to.be believed).
The necessity of a shared language would seem to be rendered obsolete by the UT, and with representatives of so many different species increasing the number of languages exponentially, and the continual encounter with new life-forms, reliance on the UT and everyone's own native languages would seem to me a foregone conclusion of how the Trek world works.
Have we? Or has it specifically been the language of the speaker- i.e. Kirk, in some instances- which is the default it would be translated into for him?
No, I am not assuming that. I am just as surprised at the idea that lingual learning of a common language as part of Starfleet Academy is a concept being entertained as you are that there is any debate on the topic. Such a concept quite literally never occurred to me; as I said, it seems needless in a IT world.
(And again, sure, that technology could fail mid-battle; so could gravity. But part of the suspension of disbelief in the Star Trek setting is that these things are considered so rare that they are not prepared against; much like the lack of seatbelts, it may not be how things would be done in real life, but the demonstrable lack of redundancy seems to evidence that the 'they would prepare in case of failure's argument doesn't apply to the Trek setting. It's just one of those tropes that immersion in the universe requires you to roll with.)
I guess that's where we fundamentally disagree. I think the technology is coming.and trusted enough that that's exactly what they'd do.
I'd even raise issues like the Intrepid, with an all-Vulcan crew. Were they really all required to learn English, and speak.iy.among themselves? If not, did their officers have to go and take a language course before they could transfer to any mixed-crew ship? I just don't see that as how Starfleet would ever work.
Well, again- that may be where we differ- I take the canon at it's world.regardless of real-world logic (heck, I don't believe Stra Trek gets basic human nature right; if I brought in my real-world objections as criteria, I'd never be able to get past Gene's 'perfected humanity' concept. :-) ). But I accept the 'unrealistic' and elements of the Trek setting as tropes that have to be accepted if you want to consume stories in that universe.
And frequent UT usage with learning languages being largely a niche-hobby thing rather than ever being a necessity is one of those tropes.
Absolutely. But it does work, Star Trek falls apart if you don't accept that, as absurd as that idea is, *in this universe, it somehow works that way anyhow.*
That is entirely fair. As I said, I think that's where our paths diverge. I'm operating on a 'since Trek says that's the way it works, how would.*that* work?' mentality, taking the perfect-instant-translation premise as a given and trying to extrapolate/imagine from that.
You are taking a much more reasonable, realistic, 'how would things actually work?' approach (it seems to me), and heck- that's probably why you're such a great writer and I couldn't even make it into the Strange New Worlds contest. :-) I'm just coming it from a different, 'drank the kool-aid' perspective of starting by not questioning the premise of things like Little Green Men, but taking it as a given and building off of it. Which is probably why we arrive at vastly different conclusions. (And again- probably why yours will sell and be ready by millions and make you money... and mine won't. :-) )
It's not about technology. It's about having an elementary understanding of how language and translation work and therefore recognizing that it is simply impossible for any translation to be perfect and instantaneous, no matter how advanced the technology. And it's about the common sense of recognizing that it would be stupid for a military crew to make themselves completely dependent on technology when starship technology frequently breaks down or malfunctions under the stresses of exploration and combat. As I said, the purpose of technology is to facilitate things we can't do for ourselves, not to make us so dependent on technology as to be incapable of functioning without it.
You keep trying to turn everything into a generalization instead of recognizing that different parameters apply to different situations. Obviously an all-Vulcan crew would speak Vulcan among themselves. The point is that they would need to learn English in order to communicate with other Starfleet crews, or to function on other ships or stations they might transfer to later in their career. The fact that English is the consensus language of Starfleet is documented repeatedly in canon and is not in dispute.
Again: bilingualism is normal. It is not a zero-sum choice. Most people on the planet Earth today are capable of conversing in two or more languages dependent on the situation. Obviously that would also be a commonplace skill in a multispecies federation. Just as in real life, people would code-switch between using their own language and using the consensus language, depending on the context.
Except the canon itself is not always consistent. The way translators are depicted to work in Star Trek Beyond is realistic -- you can hear the original speech underneath the mechanical translation, and the translation comes after a delay. The logical interpretation is that Beyond is making the effort to depict translation realistically, while other Trek productions gloss over the messy details for dramatic and logistical convenience. You can see the same difference within a single scene in The Undiscovered Country, where the trial scene starts out with Kirk and McCoy listening to machine translations of Klingon dialogue, but the actors then switch to English in what's clearly depicted as a figurative device, since Kirk and McCoy are depicted as still needing the translators. So we have canonical evidence that when characters using the UT appear to be speaking perfect English, that is not literally what we would witness if we were there in the scene, but only an approximation for ease of storytelling.
I think it is always important to be a critical observer of fiction, especially science fiction, whose goal is to attempt to depict at least a moderately plausible conjectural reality, unlike fantasy where there is no such expectation.
With respect, no, I am trying to point out circumstances that would disprove the surmised principle.
But again- that is presupposing that the universal translator couldn't do that, negating the need for learning English to communicate with those other crews. Which I do not think that the onscreen evidence supports.
Again, my contention is that this belief arises from a false premise about how things work in the Trek universe; I'm just trying to point out examples that contradict the base assumptions lying behind it.
Could you give some examples that aren't merely 'this is the language I am/would be hearing this in thanks to the UT because it is the language I speak'? That might readily solve at least that portion of the debate.
But again, you say 'obviously,' I would say 'obviously not, because that's the reason the UT exists, to remove the need for everyone to learn each-other's languages in order to communicate.'
Whereas I would say- again, based on the evidence of episodes like The 37s, Little Green Men, and Sanctuary, that the logical inference is that yes, Beyond is trying to depict translation 'realistically,' but as it does not match up with the other series' portrayals (in classes where it is not glossing over, but plot-specific detail about how it functions), that this is a quirk of the Kelvin universe technology. (Or possibly the era's; again, as per Metamorphosis, the argument could be made for less advanced UT tech in the 23rd century, even though that's not the direction I lean).
I would call it canonical evidence for the opposite- once Kirk and McCoy activate their translators, we get seamless real time English just like we do every other time. Thus, it strikes me as evidence that that's precisely how the UT works and is commonly used. (How their own were confiscated or somehow removed while a viridian patch was missed, is another question... :-) )
I don't disagree in principle, but I also think that it is necessary to recognize that in some places it is canonically established the things work differently than the way real world physics or present day logistical logic would indicate, and acknowledge those as part of the setting that's simply must be accepted. Some parts of Star Trek's technology or the principles that underly it simply don't exist in today's world, whose function is essentially magic from a modern perspective, but we simply have to accept that in the world of Star Trek, things work like that. That's true of compounds that simply do things that no modern compounds can, which enable certain medical procedures or the warp drive. It's true of some of the functions of the transporter. For certain spatial phenomena and social suggestions about human nature. And I take it to be true of the universal translator as well. 'It doesn't work that way here, but in the world of Star Trek, it somehow does.'
If it helps, I don't think we will find common ground on this, simply because we are coming at it from two different underlying assumptions (as I see it)-
'It was established this way thus it must be true, so let's figure out how it could be'
Vs.
'It couldn't have been established this way because that makes no sense, so let's figure out what would make sense.'
...And both seeking the evidence that supports that ore-supposed position, which appears to each of us to exist because, let's face it, Star Trek is not 100% consistent across 59 years, much as we'd like it to be. :-)
So we may be simply perpetually in disagreement on this point, and resolve nothing by debating it further. You are welcome to the last word on the subject.
'It was established this way thus it must be true, so let's figure out how it could be'
Vs.
'It couldn't have been established this way because that makes no sense, so let's figure out what would make sense.'
...And both seeking the evidence that supports that ore-supposed position, which appears to each of us to exist because, let's face it, Star Trek is not 100% consistent across 59 years, much as we'd like it to be. :-)
So we may be simply perpetually in disagreement on this point, and resolve nothing by debating it further. You are welcome to the last word on the subject.
This comes up fairly often in discussions of the show Farscape, where it established in the first episode that space-faring races inject their children with "translator microbes" at birth, raising the question of how anyone learns a language.
My take is that in Farscape, even though translator microbes are depicted as akin to dubbing in new sound for the TV audience, experientially, they must be more like subtitles, and you still hear the original words that were spoken (for one thing, it's a running joke that aliens pick up vocabulary phonetically from the one human character, so there are frequent malapropisms; that wouldn't happen if they felt like they were hearing him say things in their own langauges). That doesn't quite work in Star Trek, since we saw in "The '37s" that someone unfamiliar with the UT couldn't tell the difference between it and someone actually speaking their language (though it's possible you'd learn with practice, the same way the bar for CG human characters and VFX age-alteration in movies gets higher and higher every time it's done), but I doubt the UT is ubiquitous in civilian settings.
We know from DSC "An Obol for Charon" that people still learn languages the old-fashioned way, and the fact that Saru was a polyglot was able to compensate when the ship's UT broke and began translating everyone's speech and writing randomly. That could count for or against the idea that the UT is used ubiquitously on ships (the capability is apparently there), but it still seems unlikely that it'd be done, considering the possibility of total power or equipment failure. The last thing you'd need in a crisis where your computers have all crashed or you're stranded on a planet with smashed communicators is for there to be a language barrier amongst your own crew.
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