I would both love and hate to hear a “serious” Star Trek fan’s explanation for her ability to basically do that.
The Universal Translator is basically magic. TOS came closest to describing how it works, and it boiled down to, “IDK man it does some brain scans to detect your language structure”. There’s no satisfying answer as to why it knows the “Washington State Bridge” is a combination of a proper noun, a geopolitical concept, and a general noun.
In Enterprise, the Universal Translator is generally depicted as a modern miracle of technology, but one without useful internal intelligence. If it hears a few snippets of Romanian, it’s just going to start brute forcing a translation matrix with every technique it has at its disposal. More speech gives it more data to work with, but it’s still just cycling through its options.
Sato’s familiarity with xenolinguistics allows her to aid the Universal Translator by narrowing the system’s options or directing it down specific paths. She doesn’t know or learn the alien languages in the traditional sense, but she’s shown for having a knack for picking up on patterns and syntax. Again with the Romanian example, she’s doing the alien equivalent of saying, “This sounds European, skip trying to translate this as an Asian language for now”. The Universal Translator has fewer options to run through and gets to a successful translation matrix faster.
But again, it’s plot contrivance space magic.
But again, it’s plot contrivance space magic.
That’s what the people at r/DaystromInstitute will never accept. And that’s the entertaining part.
And that’s the entertaining part.
Correct. The entertainment comes after you’ve suspended your disbelief, ie literally avoided critically thinking of something — on purpose, because then you can enjoy the fiction more.
I agree there, but I meant the entertaining part was watching the r/DaystromInstitute folks and those like them seek desperately for a scientific explanation.
So, as someone whose last job was in ai:
Sigh, yeah, this is basically how it works…
Throw unimaginable amounts of data at a GPU, you convert words to numbers through an algorithm called word2vec, then correlate between the words in context, English on one side, unknown language on the other, just looking for any connection at all. If the vector products are above a threshold (we call that activation) then there might be a relationship.
Once you have it you experiment with it, try to make more associative connections building on that. The gpus just churn endlessly till they go ‘bing’.
We did a simpler version as humans with the Rosetta stone, it had Greek, which we knew, and 2 forms of Egyptian, which we didn’t.
Yeah the show is ludicrous in having someone point to a broom, say ‘mekh’ and the next sentence is ‘I’m afraid the current structure of relations in the alpha quadrant requires us to demand you no longer perform warp travel through our sector as we do not tolerate antimatter reactions under our religion’ translated from ‘guh-tah!’
Maybe it’s been explained, but on Earth, there are many languages/cultural dialects/regional-slang/etc. Those all are absent for the Klingons/Romulans/Ferengi/etc.
Dialects are mentioned in Enterprise. In the first episode Klang’s dialect is the reason Enterprise’s UT can’t lock on and translate. Later It’s mentioned in the Augment arc that Enterprise has been programmed with 7 klingon dialects.
I must have forgotten about those episodes. Thank you!
Empress Sato is like Leeloo Dallas. She’s a perfect being who learns through osmosis. Same as Odo. Different osmosis though.
One small trait I really liked about Hoshi was how she could sense when they went into warp and it discombobulated her for a second. She made a little startled sound. To me that seems really true to life, especially in an era when they were still sort of working the bugs out of everything. I would think it might give some people migraines, or they would get nauseous or black out or something.
