Star Trek: The Next Threaderation

[El Barto]

Nah, that's far more applicable to Sisko. In Riker's case, it was a lack of character, until I noticed that even he had far more than anybody else on the show.

[ReaperKK]

I really hated Riker at first.

Admit it; it was the lack of beard, wasn't it?

Riker became at least 47% more badass with the beard.

[Kotowboy]

Well at least they have an in-universe tech reason for it and don't just dismiss it like other inferior shows would.

If that's a dig at Stargate, imma hunt you down and force you to watch it on repeat! (another example where I just have to accept the contrivance for the sake of fitting any sort of story into 45 minutes)

besides - Worf *must* be speaking English for those times when he says a Klingon word to describe a situation and it isn't translated

There are plenty of similar situations that just don't work. And we know for a fact that the Ferengi of the show can't speak a lick of English from Little Green Men (which is a pretty neat episode too).

Aside from the first movie - I've never seen any Stargate.

[El Barto]

There are plenty of similar situations that just don't work. And we know for a fact that the Ferengi of the show can't speak a lick of English from Little Green Men (which is a pretty neat episode too).

Watched this last night, coincidentally. Silly but entertaining. Interesting that throughout all of the Ferengi gibberish you still heard the word oomax, which is the one Ferengi word everybody knows. 

However, I thought that was a serious undermining of the UT. They suggest that they're placed inside everybody's ear, yet apparently only one person needs it for two way communication. Fixing the one in Quark's ear automatically makes humans capable of understanding his speech. Like plenty of ST tech, it was better when it was left vague and unexplained.

[BlobVanDam]

There are plenty of similar situations that just don't work. And we know for a fact that the Ferengi of the show can't speak a lick of English from Little Green Men (which is a pretty neat episode too).

Watched this last night, coincidentally. Silly but entertaining. Interesting that throughout all of the Ferengi gibberish you still heard the word oomax, which is the one Ferengi word everybody knows. 

However, I thought that was a serious undermining of the UT. They suggest that they're placed inside everybody's ear, yet apparently only one person needs it for two way communication. Fixing the one in Quark's ear automatically makes humans capable of understanding his speech. Like plenty of ST tech, it was better when it was left vague and unexplained.

As bad as that is, they've established a few other times that only one side of the conversation needs the universal translator (I can think of examples from at least DS9 and Voyager), so at least it's consistently wrong.

Considering how flawed the tech is to begin with, I'm willing to mostly overlook the issue, given that it's rarely brought up except for times like this when it serves the plot. I agree it was better left vague and unexplained due to the problems, more of a "there's an explanation, but we're not gonna explain it", but I'm not too bothered by it either.

There are bigger problems with the concept of the translator. Translating in real-time simply would not work, given sentence structure variation between languages. And there's the inconsistency of certain words remaining in native language seemingly selectively. And as mentioned earlier, the whole idea of seeing the mouth move in a different language. And the one that bothers me the most is when you see the translator dealing with an entirely new language, where it's a matter of the universal translator hearing the language for just a few minutes and calculating a "translation matrix" and then suddenly it knows the whole language. Again, I know the translator has to move at the speed of plot, but the concept of a translator calculating a formula to instantly recognize new words such as nouns that have never been used before is ridiculous. It could pick up basic syntax and common words quickly, but there's a realistic limit there.

I've always been a tech man when it comes to scifi, so it's a bit of a double edged sword for me when they deal with the universal translator. On one hand, I do prefer to see the tech side acknowledged, and get an idea for the "rules" the show works within, but on the other hand, it does bother me when things aren't internally consistent like that.

[rumborak]

I work on realtime translation software for work actually, so it's kinda interesting to see you guys discuss this
But yes, many inherent issues with a UT. Different word orders in languages dictate a minimum latency in translation. As an example, there is a much-hated-by-foreigners feature of German where you leave the verb to the very end of the sentence. E.g. "I have the apple that was on the table, the one bought yesterday ... eaten." Since English syntax requires the verb to appear much earlier, you can't start the English translation before you heard the last German word.
The only thing that would work would be a device that scans the brain of the speaker and utters the translation straight from the thought, v not through the spoken part.

[BlobVanDam]

I didn't know that about German. But I know a lot of languages place the adjective after the noun, rather than before, which creates a similar problem on a smaller scope.

And that's human languages on the same planet. Who knows how much variation an entirely alien language would have?

[rumborak]

Let alone completely untranslatable terms, like a cultural practice like "Ramadan". English was just forced to take the Arabic word wholesale because there was no possible English translation for it.
Martin Luther decided to use the Germanic term "hell" as a translation of Hades, and thus introduced Norse mythology aspects into Christianity.
So yeah, to a good degree translation is an unsolvable problem.

[PowerSlave]

I work on realtime translation software for work actually, so it's kinda interesting to see you guys discuss this
But yes, many inherent issues with a UT. Different word orders in languages dictate a minimum latency in translation. As an example, there is a much-hated-by-foreigners feature of German where you leave the verb to the very end of the sentence. E.g. "I have the apple that was on the table, the one bought yesterday ... eaten." Since English syntax requires the verb to appear much earlier, you can't start the English translation before you heard the last German word.
The only thing that would work would be a device that scans the brain of the speaker and utters the translation straight from the thought, v not through the spoken part.

I took a year of German in highschool and this is one of the things that always tripped me up.

One of the things that I liked about Enterprise is where they tried to show how the UT was first coming into use and how they struggled with it.

[BlobVanDam]

Let alone completely untranslatable terms, like a cultural practice like "Ramadan". English was just forced to take the Arabic word wholesale because there was no possible English translation for it.

And then there are language specific idioms, and puns/wordplay that just don't translate. I watch enough foreign sub-titled movies to know how much of a pain in the ass translation can be even when it doesn't need to be done in realtime.

[rumborak]

A long time ago I translated a German movie's subtitles into English so I could show it to my American friends. What a pain that was. So many things just didn't work in English.

[BlobVanDam]

I had a 3 hour long Indian movie that I loved, but had absolutely awful subtitles, so I had to figure out what the heck they meant from a couple of different subtitle sources (one that was good, but very shortened to be quicker to read, and another source that was a directly literal translation but made no sense at all), and redo the whole thing. And I don't know Indian! That was a huge pain in the ass.

And it was a comedy, with a lot of word play that had no working translation. I could tell what the joke was, but there was just no way to make it work in another language. Apparently their phrase for turning on the TV translates literally as something like "drop the TV", which was a required part of the joke of the scene.

Even as a manual process, translating is difficult, because you're translating more than just words. When people speak a language, they're speaking within the confines of a specific cultural context, which includes assumed knowledge and familiarity that can't be translated automatically on the fly as the universal translator would imply.

It's exactly the point in the TNG episode Darmok. Even completely understanding the words, the meaning of the words was lost due to necessary assumed knowledge and cultural understanding.

[Kotowboy]

TL;DR : it's just a quick fix for allowing all aliens to speak english

[El Barto]

I am actually speaking Rigelian.  By an astonishing coincidence, both of our languages are exactly the same.

[Kotowboy]

I recognise that ?

[BlobVanDam]

I recognise that ?

The Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror, when Kang and Kudos abduct the Simpsons.

[sueño]

Even as a manual process, translating is difficult, because you're translating more than just words. When people speak a language, they're speaking within the confines of a specific cultural context, which includes assumed knowledge and familiarity that can't be translated automatically on the fly as the universal translator would imply.

It's exactly the point in the TNG episode Darmok. Even completely understanding the words, the meaning of the words was lost due to necessary assumed knowledge and cultural understanding.

As frustrating as it is, that's one of the things I love about languages in general.   It is fascinating.

[The King in Crimson]

Yeah, it's best not to think about the specifics of the UT. It really just makes no sense whatsoever.

BTW, the show to best work around this issue was Farscape. Just simple and effective.

[El Barto]

In Enterprise there was always a delay, where Hoshi would say that the UT hadn't had time to figure stuff out yet. That seems pretty reasonable. I suspect there's a data set that you could assemble which would be sufficient for a computer to learn English, for example. Certainly a computer 200 years from now. Probably fit on a floppy disk. A dictionary and 15-20 sentences demonstrating some syntax. "The boy is playing with the red ball." That sort of stuff. You transmit that, they transmit theirs, and after a minute or two the UTs have it all figured out. This seems pretty reasonable. Sometimes it make take longer. ST just treated the whole thing like magic. The aforementioned DS9 episode demonstrated that pretty damned well.

[Kotowboy]

Petition to change the thread title to

" Star Trek: The United Threaderation of Planets "

[rumborak]

"Star Trek, and Thread. On DTF."

[BlobVanDam]

Petition to change the thread title to

" Star Trek: The United Threaderation of Planets "

Nice.

In Enterprise there was always a delay, where Hoshi would say that the UT hadn't had time to figure stuff out yet. That seems pretty reasonable. I suspect there's a data set that you could assemble which would be sufficient for a computer to learn English, for example. Certainly a computer 200 years from now. Probably fit on a floppy disk. A dictionary and 15-20 sentences demonstrating some syntax. "The boy is playing with the red ball." That sort of stuff. You transmit that, they transmit theirs, and after a minute or two the UTs have it all figured out. This seems pretty reasonable. Sometimes it make take longer. ST just treated the whole thing like magic. The aforementioned DS9 episode demonstrated that pretty damned well.

Enterprise did it well, because it only came through as text, and was completely feasible, and required more manual imput, which made Hoshi's job on the ship more useful (although they still wasted her).

[Nick]

Petition to change the thread title to

" Star Trek: The United Threaderation of Planets "

Won't change this one, but remind me in 2500 replies or so.

[Kotowboy]

If there was one character on TNG that didn't need to be there - it was Troi.

She did next to nothing except sense stuff or get mind raped

She almost never went on away missions and they barely ever showed her counselling anyone.

Even in the films she was just sort of there in the background.

Nothing against Marina in any way but it's like they didn't really know what to do with her week after week.

If Troi was in her quarters - and she looked in the mirror - shit was about to happen. 

She barely even had any character arc either.

[sueño]

She was very pretty...   

[JayOctavarium]

She made a fine cake

[Kotowboy]

Good Tea.






... Nice House.

[rumborak]

Trying to watch the episode where Data hooks up with that ensign. Ugh, painful.

[Kotowboy]

I hate any episode of anything where it's a "romance" story.

The one where Riker falls for that androgynous alien is pretty poor too.

[BlobVanDam]

I hate any episode of anything where it's a "romance" story.

The one where Riker falls for that androgynous alien is pretty poor too.

That episode was easily one of my least favourite TNG episodes. Give me a CG space whale or spacial anomaly any day.

[Kotowboy]

" But I love you ! "

it's a genderless alien - two reasons right there that this can never happen.

It was like it was trying to cram all of Star Trek's values into a single episode.

[Orbert]

I found that episode kinda weird and awkward, but interesting.  As I saw it, the idea was to completely separate love from gender.  Sure, some of it was metaphor for homosexual rights, but if you can't take it to the next step in science fiction, where else can you take it?  So the next step is exploring how people totally without gender would experience love.

In our culture, emotional love is always tied up with physical love.  I think one of the main points of that episode was that it doesn't have to be.  Why should it be that asexual people cannot experience monogamous, emotional love?

[Kotowboy]

I've also noticed that "impulse speed" is also " whatever the script requires. "

It's never stated explicitly how fast impulse is...It's either slow when you need it to be slow or fast but not warp 1.


Full impulse is either half of warp 1 or when in starbase it's manouvering speed.

[Orbert]

It's not consistent at all.  There's a TNG episode where Picard says "Ahead, full impulse" and Geordi (who's at the helm) replies "Aye, ahead warp 6".  There's other times when it's implied, if not stated outright, that "warp" is hyperlight and "impulse" is sublight.

[Kotowboy]

Yes exactly. I looked it up online and it's inconsistent across all Trek.

It can either mean Half of Warp 1 or very very slow depending on the situation.



Other times they even use "k/ph" . I assume that must mean infinitesimally slow for The Enterprise.