sigmaleph:

jenroses:

thereallieutenantcommanderdata:

Things that should happen in a Sci-Fi story with a Universal Translator

One character who constantly makes bad puns … except the UT totally fails to translate them.  “I guess you could say he … had a bad time”, “Well, I don’t think they’ll be … visiting again any time soon”.  There’s some other aliens of the same species who groan every time

A group of aliens who share a common language get into a discussion about grammar … but the UT translates the word they’re arguing about the same way every time.  “It looks like they left in a hurry … or is it ‘left’?” “You’re expressing uncertainty, so you have to use the subjunctive form ‘left’” “No, you don’t use the subjunctive here, you’re expressing a deduction based on evidence, so you have to use the deductive form ‘left’” “Wait, you say ‘left’ for the deductive?  Are you from the Southern Continent?” “Yes, I am.  Wait, what’s it in your dialect?” “We say ‘left’ where I’m from”

A character unexpectedly becomes angry at another character.  At the end of the episode you find out that the first character had switched verb forms to a more affectionate form when speaking to the second character and was mad that they were ignoring the obvious indication of their feelings

The captain nearly derails tense diplomatic negotiations because of a UT slip up, inadvertently implying a definite claim to a particular planet, as opposed to a tentative claim subject to negotiation

The crew is visited by a group of aliens whose UT is a few centuries out of date, so they’re greeted with Early Modern English

An alien recites the equivalent of Jabberwocky and the UT just completely gives us “’Twas something and the something something did something and something in the something …”

okay but I once went researching pumpkin names in French and Google autotranslated and I read with my own eyeballs the sentence, “Pumpkins, pumpkins and pumpkins are all different from each other.”

‘no es lo mismo ser que estar’, or in english, ‘being and being are not the same thing’

Tags:

#language #story ideas I will never write #yes this #some of these would be a bit embarrassment-squicky for my *personal* taste in stories #but still #and anyway when writers ignore translators sometimes they *still* end up with cringe-comedy mistranslations by accident #so it’s not perfect protection #(like in one of the comments that I will be rounding up soon) #((Cardassians try to hold a detective denouement #but due to a translation error half the people there think it’s a trial and try to apply a trial’s rules))

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