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”
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.
To be fair we named our planet “dirt”
That’s actually quite original, considering we call our moon The Moon
Luna
da princess…
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.
Shaka
I’m laughing at this far more than I should be.
I’m gonna steal this.
I know someone made this joke before, but I can’t find it.
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.
Don’t forget The La Brea Tar pits. Naan bread and chai tea.
Naan bread and chai tea 🤦♀️
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 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?’
I’d be surprised if aliens don’t do the same thing with their place names, tbh.
One of the many reasons why the only universal translator that makes sense is the Babel Fish
Oh dear!
What do you call this planet? Earth And what do you call the ground that you dig up? Earth but it is only capital because it is at the beginning of the sentence otherwise it is earth. Do you pronounce Earth and earth differently? No Ok what do you call the big rocks that orbit planets? Moons And let me guess you call your moon, Moon? Some people prefer Lunar Isn’t that just moon in a different language? Yes
Well, nobody who’s ever lived on the moon calls it Luna, either. That’s just something they say on Earth.
They also named a city in California “Lake Forest” while having neither a lake nor a forest.
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.
Is this the one with Captain Jester and the aliens keep calling him “Fool”?
No I don’t think so
☹️
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?
Easy: Don’t translate proper names. Translators often don’t do that anyway.
I think we need to look at how the universal translator works to answer this. Does it listen to the sounds and guess the meaning from a limited sample of words, does it scan your mind/network for information?
The real question is how it can do lip sync.
Not sure if that’s specifically an English issue or if other language work the same way, but I do know that, in French, I would just say “le Sahara” and would only say “le désert du Sahara” if I’m talking to someone who really sucks at geography.
Same for rivers, I would just say “l’Avon” unless I suspect my interlocutor doesn’t know it’s a river, in which case I would probably simply add “you know, the river in Great Britain”
Without actually doing any research or analysis, I feel like in English we’d say “the Sahara” slightly more often than “the Sahara desert”, but both are pretty common. I don’t think I would ever just say “the Avon”, but I would just say “the Thames”. So I think it comes down to how large the object looms in my mind, whether it feels acceptable not to include the descriptor.
Wikipedia’s article on tautological names has some French examples, including the Lac de Gaube, Châteaudun, Montcuq, Côtes-d’Armor, and Col de Port.
Oh we definitely have tons of tautological names for places, France has a big history of different cultures mixing and old languages merging together. What I meant is we don’t tend to add nouns to describe things, like in “X river”, “Y mountain” or even “Z fruit”.
