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”
“What do you call that?” “That’s the yarra, mate.” “We shall call it the Yarra River.”
Me, a genius: because they stop talking
Chai tea wants to join this discussion
Together with Naan bread.
They also named a city in California “Lake Forest” while having neither a lake nor a forest.
the los angeles angels of anaheim
The the angles angels of the home by the river saint, ah yes
The La Brea tar pits
East Timor / Timor-Leste
To be fair we named our planet “dirt”
That’s actually quite original, considering we call our moon The Moon
Luna
da princess…
Germany literally has over 40 cities or towns with the name “Neustadt”. That’s German for “new city”.
You find Novi Grad, Nowgorod, and variations all over Slavic Europe, which also means new city.
Nouvelle Village in France. Novaci in Romania as well.
Probably exists in many languages and regions.
and I thought Newcastle was silly
Newcastle happens to also be on the river Ouseburn (which joins the Tyne), which is three consecutive names for running water.
Are we talking upon Tyne or under Lyme?
Newton in English…new town.
In the US we have a river named New River and of course it’s actually one of the oldest in the world.
Same in France with “neuve”, also “franche” which indicated a special tax exempt status.
So those usually have something to distinguish them from the others.
Like a river they are sat on or some mountain nearby. One of my favourite such name is Laneuveville-devant-Nancy : TheNewTown-Infrontof-Nancy (Nancy being a bigger city nearby). It has a strong named-by-modern-programmers energy…I think this is why postal codes are a thing.
Naan bread and chai tea 🤦♀️
What did you just say? Chai tea?! ‘Chai’ means tea, bro! You’re saying ‘tea tea!’ Would I ask you for a ‘coffee coffee’ with room for ‘cream cream?’
Is it weird that chai tea bothers me but naan bread doesn’t?
Not particularly, because naan doesn’t directly mean bread. Naan is one type of flatbread. Chai means tea. Even if you’re referring to black tea in Hindi.
yes
What about words that translate to multiple differrent words
I imagine that the UT is intelligent enough to take in the full context of the sentence and the broader conversation to know which word is meant.
What if you mean both?
Clever plays on words like that can prove a real challenge for even the most expert of real-world human translators.
yes
First of all you don’t need aliens for this, all you need is different languages and we already have those, we even have something close to universal translators, so much for sci-fi. Any decent universal translator would know that for example Sahara is a name in English and would try to either translate the name to the corresponding name in the target language if it has one or just as a name. It doesn’t matter what the origin of the word is, it’s a name. Sticking with Sahara as an example, you can translate “Sahara desert” to Arabic and back and you wouldn’t get “desert desert”. It actually has a name in Arabic that is something like “the greatest desert” and I assume that for most of those places there exist other names.
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
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.
Easy: Don’t translate proper names. Translators often don’t do that anyway.
There’s a book called my buddy have be a starship that actually deals with this sort of. Translator keeps calling earth “dirt” to an alien that has only one word for dirt. Many jokes about that sort of thing throughout.
Harry Harrison , The Stainless Steel Rat series, where Esperanto is a language of culture and every now and then there is talk of the legendary lost homeworld of humanity called Dirt? And the main character is James “Slippery Jim” Bolivar DiGriz?
Is this the one with Captain Jester and the aliens keep calling him “Fool”?
No I don’t think so
☹️
