Persistent, Niggling Questions

[Nate the Great]

Ah, the transporter. One place where I have to admit that Pulaski's character wasn't well written. McCoy would gripe, but he never avoided the thing. He understood that it was a necessity to do his job. Except for that one time, Barclay sucked it up and beamed anyway. But Pulaski? She didn't even have a transporter trace, which meant that she almost died in "Unnatural Selection" because of her stubbornness. "Unnatural Selection" was Stardate 42494.8, "The Child" was 42073.1. That means that she avoided using the transporter for FIVE MONTHS! For a starship I find that inexplicable, especially the flagship. Especially for the Chief Medical Officer.



I recall McCoy referring to himself as "Chief Surgeon" of the Enterprise once. I wonder if some ships have two separate jobs for this, one to handle the crew as a whole along with away missions (McCoy was also the ship's psychologist, remember) and one to stay in Sickbay to handle the bigger medical problems. What if Pulaski wasn't really "Chief Medical Officer" but was really "Chief Surgeon", a non-senior officer position that stays onboard ship at all times. What if there was another unseen doctor who handled the away team stuff?

[Nate the Great]

One of the TNG TV Tropes pages calls the Universal Translator "maybe above all the rest, the single biggest "don't think about this too much" technology in all of Star Trek."


PNQ: Opinions?


After all, as presented the UT has to be able to do the following:
1. Scan the language centers of the brains of everyone in range to form a translation matrix that can be used on the fly.
2. Listen to the speaker's voice to not only translate the words, but also create a copycat artificial voice so everyone doesn't sound like Stephen Hawking.
3. Not only translate based on universal linguistic principles (and let's not even get into how THAT works), but restructure the translation to sound more natural to the ears of the specific person wearing the combadge.

4. Create holographic projections of lips over everyone in range so the lips look like they're speaking the language of whoever is wearing the UT AND not conflict with the projections of the other combadges in range.
5. Obey rules specialized for each language on what to translate or not translate (i.e. say "bat'leth", not "sword of honor", say "Gul" not "Captain").
6. Mute the sound of the original words to not overlap with the computer-generated translation. Oh, and be able to do this for dozens of people in dozens of different places speaking dozens of languages SIMULTANEOUSLY.


Kinda makes the Babel Fish sound less implausible, doesn't it?

[Flying Gremlin]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

One of the TNG TV Tropes pages calls the Universal Translator "maybe above all the rest, the single biggest "don't think about this too much" technology in all of Star Trek."


PNQ: Opinions?


After all, as presented the UT has to be able to do the following:
1. Scan the language centers of the brains of everyone in range to form a translation matrix that can be used on the fly.
2. Listen to the speaker's voice to not only translate the words, but also create a copycat artificial voice so everyone doesn't sound like Stephen Hawking.
3. Not only translate based on universal linguistic principles (and let's not even get into how THAT works), but restructure the translation to sound more natural to the ears of the specific person wearing the combadge.

4. Create holographic projections of lips over everyone in range so the lips look like they're speaking the language of whoever is wearing the UT AND not conflict with the projections of the other combadges in range.
5. Obey rules specialized for each language on what to translate or not translate (i.e. say "bat'leth", not "sword of honor", say "Gul" not "Captain").
6. Mute the sound of the original words to not overlap with the computer-generated translation. Oh, and be able to do this for dozens of people in dozens of different places speaking dozens of languages SIMULTANEOUSLY.


Kinda makes the Babel Fish sound less implausible, doesn't it?

I taste pennies now after reading this. That's bad, right?

[Nate the Great]

Of course, the weird thing is that in TOS the only confirmed appearance of the UT was in "Metamorphosis." You know, the one where they try to translate energy pulses being "spoken" by a creature that doesn't have vocal chords or any of a thousand different reference points that a UT would need to extract a language? In all other episodes everyone just happens to speak English! Not even "Federation Standard", but outright English!



Maybe I'll buy that the Klingons learned English to communicate with the Federation. Maybe I'll buy that the Guardian of Forever has something akin to a UT to allow it to talk to visitors. But that doesn't allow for the dozens of other cases where everyone just speaks English. How did the residents of Sigma Iota II read The Book? How can the Fabrini speak anything close to our language if they've been isolated for ten thousand years! Even Vulcan society doesn't go that far back!

[Nate the Great]

And don't forget that a big chunk of a combadge is just solid gold.

[Flying Gremlin]

Too bad you'll never see Discovery. S2E4 "An Obol for Charon" will throw three more monkey wrenches into your thought process about the UT.

[Nate the Great]

So a comment on a random YouTube video suggests that Uhura couldn't speak Klingon because Nomad wiped that knowledge from her mind and she didn't relearn it.


PNQ: Opinions?


Yeah, no. She had over twenty years to relearn a language as important as Klingon. Remember that she was an instructor at Starfleet Academy for many years, she had the time.