**PICARD: ** You cow! A chair could sense hostility! :mad:
Seriously, why? Do all communications officers these days understand Russian, Chinese, or Arabic? 
Nope. No technology will ever be so advanced as to make you hear your language and see their mouths move as if they were speaking your language. It’s pure fantasy realm magic. I’m okay with that, mind you, but it is what it is.
Uhura is not just any communications officer. She is senior officer on Starfleet’s flagship, one of only 12 in its class. The Enterprise’s mission is to range out into unexplored space and “seek out new life and new civilizations” and Kirk would insist on all of his officers being highly trained and the best in their fields. Part of Uhura’s job is understanding alien languages and adding them to the translator’s database. In addition, the Klingons were the Federation’s declared adversary in the original series. It could mean the survival of the Enterprise for at least most of the senior bridge officers to understand Klingon without depending on the UT. I’m sure the Klingons also had experts studying English or whatever the Federation’s official language was.
Having Uhura not understand Klingon in The Undiscovered Country was a means of providing cheap comedy, much like Scotty bumping his head on a bulkhead in the previous film.
So why couldn’t they talk to the whales in ST IV? Whales are as intelligent as us, no? UT wouldn’t work, WHY?
Is this where Xena says “wizard”?
Pak Protectors designed them to work on the seeded life forms from the Ancient Humanoids. Whales are just different enough to throw it all out of whack.
Meh. This is one of the concepts that does NOT benefit from overthinking it. Even if you had a gadget that could directly interface with the brains of alien life forms and directly translate a concept, you’re still going to trip over idioms, connotations, slang…
Captain Kirk: “Ya mama wore army boots!” (ancient Earth insult, implying that one’s mother was a camp follower/prostitute, thus making the listener illegitimate; the phrase is intended as an insult.)
Klingon translation: “Your maternal parent wore the footgear of a soldier!” (no direct Klingon interpretation, but it seems to imply that one’s mother was a warrior; to a Proud Warrior Race like the Klingons, this might well be taken as a compliment.) “You were acquainted with my mother? Were her victories glorious?”
No need for a UT there. Spock did a mind meld with the whale, remember? Who needs the UT?
That’s a very good point. In effect, Spock is a UT.
The UT was as sexist as anything back in those ST:TOS days. It read the Companion’s “concepts” as being caring, compassionate, and nurturing (even though it sucks Cochrane’s energy dry), so of course it gave the Companion a female voice.
Could they translate Jive?
It’s a pretty far fetched concept. It does work a bit better, though, if you imagine that every time it encounters a new language it takes a while to build up the appropriate database like in that DS9 episode, but the shows just skip over that part for the sake of dramatization.
The translator worked just fine in Darmok. It translated everything Dathon said perfectly. Picard just lacked the cultural background to follow the metaphors.
It’s no different than if it translated a Japanese person saying ‘that will be difficult’, instead of ‘nope, can’t be done’, or an Earthling saying ‘I struck out’, rather than ‘I failed to achieve my goal’.
The Tamaranians speaking entirely in metaphors is…let’s call it far-fetched…but the translator just spitting out the metaphors directly is exactly how it’d be expected to work.
Respectfully disagree, for the following reasons:
(a) Becoming proficient in a language takes a great deal of time and effort (normally four years of undergraduate study and three years of graduate work just to earn an MA). It is something you have to specialize and immerse yourself in to operate at the level of a translator.
(b) Translating is not something senior officers should have to concern themselves with. You need a reliable translation, you turn to someone who works with languages for a living, probably an NCO or a WO. (A classmate of mine attended the US Army language school in Monterrey, CA, where she was training as a simultaneous translator, a skill far beyond my own capabilities. She was a staff sergeant.)
(c) Creating or updating data banks is grunt work. A senior communications officer wouldn’t do it herself; she’d delegate it to an underling who is probably more skilled in that field of expertise than she is.
(d) Unless your language skills are at a native or near-native level of proficiency, you have no business translating in a situation where your survival (and that of uncounted others) is at stake. I’ve seen how crappy translators can ruin the simplest *business *negotiations. I’d hate to think that someone who is not fully qualified would be entrusted with handling matters of life and death.
Two of the concepts common to many species are “male” and “female.” The latter obviously predominated in The Companion’s thoughts and was interpreted as such.
Really for any race with the ability to go into space there are many things which would be universal constants especially in the world of electronics (voltage, amps, energy), engineering (acceleration, propulsion, material strength), mathematics (numbers, the value of pi, speed of light) and such. And I imagine most machines work on the same principles and are built using wires, screws, welds and such so it you basically have device A supplies power to device B to make it work.
So for example in one Trek book the first time an Earth ship encountered the people of Alpha Centauri the 2 ships mathematicians sat down and worked out math by for example, drawing a circle, making a section, and then showing the symbol for pi.
Now concepts for things like love, hate, politics and all would be difficult.
In the book “Balance of Power” the universal translator works off of analyzing speech and putting together a language together. It works slowly though depending upon how much information the alien race is willing to share.
Nah, just heteronormative. It interpreted the language as someone who was falling in love with Cochrane.
*How do we know Spock used the correct voice chip in the UT?
*Any reason the Companion has to have a gender? Why not both? How about a third, unfamiliar gender? All three (or more)? Wouldn’t it reproduce by fission?
*What do you think the Companion is going to do when it finds out Kirk scragged one of its relatives in “Obsession”?
*Wasn’t Elinor Donahue hot on the Andy Griffith show?
*Is my universal translator actidjuwqbecfhnksla;ma/’
Now that we have a good handle on the UT, can we next explain how the SHHH doors know when to open and when not to? Thank you.
They still needed someone to state the obvious.