Transcription
A series of Tweets by @Foone, each replying to the last:
Here’s the question I always have with universal translators in sci-fi: how do they know when to stop translation? Like say an alien asks about deserts on earth, and the human lists “the sahara desert, gobi desert and kalahari desert” Alien: You just said “desert” six times.
(“Sahara” is Arabic for “desert”. “Gobi” is Mongolian for “desert”, and “Kalahari” is Tswana for “desert”)
Man, the aliens are going to think we’re so bad at naming. Cause really, aren’t we?
Brit: Behold, the beautiful River Avon!
Alien: Ahh, the River River. You humans have such a knack for naming things.
“Here we are in Chad, looking upon the mighty Lake Chad!”
"Ahh yes, the land of Lake, bordering the Lake Lake. Another fine human name. "
“And here’s Nyanza Lac, in Burundi. As you can tell by the fact that it’s named Lake Lake in Bantu & French, it’s a la… actually this one’s a city. A city named Lake Lake”
All of a sudden “Darmok” is a much less stupid episode.
Darmok is a great episode… it’s the other episodes that are stupid when the translator works on aliens they just met.
One of those things where I guess it would get old if every time they met an alien they’d have to go through a labourious process of figuring out their language.
But with Darmok there’s at least one episode where they have to deal with figuring out how to communicate with aliens. Realistically it should probably go something like that every time time they meet someone new. Also humans have many languages, so likely every alien species would have a lot of different languages.
Allow me to translate this for everyone looking at this comment and trying to figure out what it means and can’t be bothered to google it.
You MUST IMMEDIATELY go find/stream/steal Star Trek - The Next Generation S5E02 - “Darmok” before participating in this thread.
And if you don’t understand it, watch it again until you do.
You’re welcome.
Shaka

Image source
I’m gonna steal this.
I know someone made this joke before, but I can’t find it.
I’m laughing at this far more than I should be.