From: jwindley%asylum.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Jay Windley)
Subject: Re: Universal translaters-
Date: 17 Dec 92 11:56:31 MST
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept

cs202144@umbc8.umbc.edu (cs202144) writes:
>
>Anyway since it obviously cannot read minds being a machine, it can still
>read brain waves.

What's the difference?

Besides, the UT can work over subspace radio.  How can it read the
brain waves of beings hundreds of light years away?

And reading brain waves or minds doesn't give you anything.  In a
first contact situation you can't be at all assured that your machine
is correctly interpreting brain waves.  The first contact language
problem stems from trying to learn a language given absolutely no
knowledge of how it works.  The same problem applies to brain waves or
other by-product emissions.  You can't interpret brain waves correctly
if you've never encountered the species before.

>If about 3 people from the same race, speak the same
>language for a few hours the universal translator will gain tons of
>gramatical rules and idioms it can use to translate from one language to the
>other.

Agreed.  But idioms are not always interpretable from context or from
brief usage.  Consider the English idiom "take a crap."  It connotes
exactly the opposite of what it denotes -- you're not taking
something, you're leaving something behind.  If this phrase were used
in a conversation between native English speakers, there would be
nothing in the context to supply the correct meaning.  The idiom would
probably be incorrectly understood by a non-native observer.

I'm sure the grammatical rules and such would be deciphered much more
easily than the semantics.  Words simply have arbitrary meanings
assigned to them, their denotations and connotations determined by
convention, not necessarily by pattern or context.

The word "gift" in German means "poison."  The sequence of letters and
the accompanying phonemes mean different things in different languages
simply because the speakers of those langauges have agreed to make the
given associations.

So the UT would need some way of accumulating a lexicon of a new
language -- some way of deriving meanings for language constructs.
This might be theoretically separate from the computational engine
which manipulates the grammar.  In my limited experience, grammars
tend to be easy to learn while vocabularies are not.

>When the Enterprise meets a race, expecially a non-human looking (humanoid
>but definately not human or even close) for the first time and they know
>english that is wierd...The translator cannot translate a language that quick
>without even hearing a few words of the alien tounge to determine if it is
>a language that the computer might even know.

Yes, this is the big problem.  One might postulate that just as there
is some similarity between many Earth languages (i.e., languages from
the same families share grammar and vocabularies), there is some
similarity between some galactic languages.  TNG "Contagion" seems to
support this, as well as the popular notion that species in our
galaxy (including humans) evolved from a prehistoric proto-humanoid
species which seeded itself widely throughout the galaxy.

This might be the basis for an assertion that galactic languages
really aren't so diverse as we fear, and the UT doesn't have to be as
magical as we have assumed.

And of course we have to give credit for the 400 years of linguistics
which happens between now and Star Trek.  This linguistic study would
include learning non-terrestrial langauges such as Vulcan, as well as
absorption of other species' linguistic knowledge.

>Why do they always (well 95+% of the time) exaplain these things in novels,
>but the episodes always seem to forget to explain it?

It's acceptable for an author to step outside the narrative of a novel
and spend a paragraph or two explaining the features of the
environment.  But in visual drama, the entire story must be told by
the actions and speech of the characters, augmented only by the
relatively unfettered point of the view of the camera (i.e., we can
instantly change scenes and view things from impossible perspectives).

There is no simple way of "stepping out" of a video narrative.
Explanations of things have to be carefully worked into dialogue such
that the necessary information is conveyed without making someone
sound stupid.  For example, when a Romulan ship cloaks, someone
usually mentions the fact that the ship will be unable to fire.
Everyone knows this, but it's for the benefit of the audience.
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         Jay Windley  *  University of Utah  *  Salt Lake City
                    jwindley@asylum.cs.utah.edu
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