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”
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?
To be fair we named our planet “dirt”
That’s actually quite original, considering we call our moon The Moon
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.
One of the many reasons why the only universal translator that makes sense is the Babel Fish
Don’t forget The La Brea Tar pits. Naan bread and chai tea.
The real question is how it can do lip sync.
I’d be surprised if aliens don’t do the same thing with their place names, tbh.
Easy: Don’t translate proper names. Translators often don’t do that anyway.
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?’
