Translation & Interpreting in SciFi

Cafe Society
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Okay, all you SciFi readers out there…
There´s an infinite number of peoples out there in the SciFi universe, speaking an infinite number of languages… yet they get on quite well (or at least agree on when to start shooting each other to crap, depending on their policy…).
How come? As always, as in Earth politics, there usually is some kind of translating device (Enterprise´s board computer) or interpreter (Babelfish).
However (and here again, strong parallels to Earth), they are hardly ever mentioned, except when they don´t work.

In most science fiction novels/films/series you just feed in the alien language, push a button and zing, you´ve got your translation. Only exception I remember on STNG is “Darmok”, where the aliens communicate solely via metaphors (“Shaka when the walls fell”, if you remember…), whereupon the computer cannot translate it.
But apart from these totally unfounded translating/interpreting systems, there are some described in great detail in SciFi novels, or at least with some attempt at explanation, be it linguistics or translation theory. (My favourite example: “Babel 17”)

Ok, and here is where I ask you: translation/interpreting references in SciFi, anyone? be it short stories, novels, films, whatever… be it persons, computers, strange radiation or fish… linguistically sound or not, as long as there is more than two words about them. Especially their status/image in the given society would be interesting.
Oh, and if only an alien language is described in detail, without translation to English or whatever, that´s fine, too :slight_smile:

This might become the topic of my thesis if I find enough material, so go ahead, post anything you can think of; preferrably with a short summary, but at least title and/or author…

and if I don´t get to write my thesis, at least I´ll have some nice new stories to read… :slight_smile:

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Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger In A Strange Land” went pretty heavily into detail about the Martian language, because our protagonist, Mike, knew that certain Martian concepts simply could not be adequately expressed in any OTHER language. Your language defines, to some extent, how you think, and the book addresses this to some extent. It does a fine job of very slowly bringing into understanding a variety of wildly alien concepts that are embodied in this language… particularly the Martian word “grok” which originally seems to mean “understand”, but ultimately winds up meaning MUCH more than that.

Good read.

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If I recall, the classic Murray Leinster story “First Contact” goes into this a bit, as well.

Come to think of it, a lot of “Golden Age” stories had humans colonizing other inhabited worlds and leaving it up to the natives to learn good ol’ English like the downtrodden heathens they are.

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Sorry to hijack, but** Universe**, I really do get a chuckle out of your username. Stick around, based on your OP (assuming your first) I’ll be interested in chatting with you.

back to your regularly scheduled thread

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H. Beam Piper’s “Omnilingual” is about the problem of translation, even though his solution is nonsense.

Terry Carr’s “The Dance of the Changer and the Three” is a very good piece on the difficulty of understanding aliens even if you can communicate with them.

More recently, there’s Ray Vukcevich’s The Wages of Syntax, which touches on the issue exactly as you have pointed out (though it’s not exactly the main thread of the story).

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Barry Longyear’s Enemy Mine, a short story published in Asimov’s in 1979. While the actual story is that of a human and alien stranded on a planet who have to learn to work together in order to survive, the author goes into some detail on each of the characters learning the others language and the cultural background of the alien. A later book by the same author, The Enemy Papers includes two sequels to the original story and additional material related to the stories which includes a glossary of the alien language and an essay on formulating an alien language.

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What SF are you reading? Star Trek novelizations? The ‘Universal Translator’ is not a very common theme in SF, and stories I can think of that do have something similar usually go into some explanation of how it works and it’s weaknesses (i.e. the translators in the Ringworld series cause all kinds of problems for the adventurers, and this is 29th century technology!).

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Most of those are simply adventure/action stories which uses space as an exotic setting. They are not SF (speculative fiction) in the true sense. Some true SF do use such shortcuts because it allows the author to explore human behaviour in unusual situations, such as contact with completely different cultures. It can be a very effective way of telling a story. Star Trek is borderline between these categories.

Then there are SF novels that treat the communication problem more realistically. Arthur C. Clarke has written many stories like that; the monoliths in 2001 don’t speak English, and there is no actual communication in Rendezvous with Rama. Stanislav Lem has explored this issue further, focusing on the limitations of humans to understand or even recognize aliens. There are many others like that.

I find Stanislaw Lem’s view to be the most realistic. It’s stupid to think that an alien can learn our language, or we theirs, since much of human language is hard-wired into our brain.

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Thanks everyone, keep them coming… sounds pretty interesting, all of it.
RealityChuck, I liked the Vukevich story and that´s exactly the kind of stuff I´m looking for. Thanks!
It doesn´t matter so much to me whether the translation approach is actually viable (as you say it isn´t in Omnilingual), that´s part of my topic.
To clear things up a bit: I mentioned the “standard” SciFi-stories/series with universal translators (e.g. Star Trek) because that´s not what I´m looking for, I prefer the “classics” (along the lines of Asimov and Clarke), and I guess that´s where I´ll find most of my material…
Of course, it makes for some amusing entertainment once in a while to hear people say “oh, we had our computer analyze the recordings (about five minutes) and now it can do simultaneous interpreting”, and hey, it even does accents when different aliens are speaking :slight_smile:
But, as I said, that´s not what I´m looking for. Analysis of alien languages, communication problems, automatic translation (however fictitious) and, especially, human interpreters or linguists…

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Suzette Haden Elgin’s “Native Tongue” novels deal with language quite extensively (she’s a linguist), but I don’t think they’re about alien languages.

“Stardance” by Spider and Jeanne Robinson shows a different way of communication.

Robert F. Young wrote a story called “Written in the Stars,” where something accidentally forms a word in an alien language, leading to amusing consequences. There seem to be some linguistics involved in it – the aliens form verbs in their written language for combining the the words for two nouns.

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Most TV and Movie SF doesn’t do much with translation, but IMO that has a lot to do with the medium - doing lots of subtitles or gibberish tends to lose audiences to a much greater degree than doing so in a book. Babylon 5 and Stargate SG1 both touched on translations a little bit, and pretty clearly established that there are multiple different languages, but don’t have many episodes where its significant.

Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky has a rather bit of translation (you don’t really get the interesting bit about the translation until the end of the book), and A Fire Upon the Deep incidentally touches on various translation issues for a galaxy-wide civilization (though it’s far from the focus of the book).

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In Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series, some humans become passengers on a gigantic ship built by unknown aliens. On their voyage, the humans find that there are other passengers on the ship and they learn to communicate with them. I am thinking particularly of the octo-spiders that communicate using flashes of color. The book (I think this may occur in the second or third book of the series) describes the humans learning this new language. IIRC, there is also a description of one character trying to decipher some of the alien code of the makers of the ship. Sounds like what you’re looking for.