We all know about the universal translator which has been around since the original series first began. I was just thinking though what would we need for something similar to that in our world.

Would it be a hard thing to accomplish as far as languages here on Earth are concerned?

I beg to differ...
(not really)

Machine translation of known languages is pretty advanced already and getting better all the time. DeepL Translator claims to be the best, and I think Google Translate has gotten better over the years. It's one of the things that artificial intelligence tools (of certain types) are actually good for. Of course, it can never be 100% accurate, since there are always words and concepts that don't exactly correspond from one language to another and can only be approximated, so nuances are lost in translation, and puns and figurative language can be lost entirely.

Instant translation of unknown languages, however, is an absolute fantasy and will never be possible. It takes time to build mutual understanding between speakers of different languages who have never encountered each other before. You'd have to start with universal concepts like math and physics to begin establishing points of commonality, then build from there, which could take a lot of time. (In my Trek novels, I've handwaved that "hailing frequencies" are actually a protocol whereby two ships' computers perform that process in a matter of seconds so that communication can be established. The concept of "linguacode" referenced in TMP and Enterprise is implicitly the same kind of thing. But it doesn't explain the kind of situation where a landing party beams down to the surface of a preindustrial planet and the translator is instantly able to decipher the language. That's purely a dramatic conceit to streamline the storytelling.)

Thanks for the informative post. The kind of thing I eas thinking about was a dedicated device that you could carry on yourself that would have some kind of database of common spoken languages of say Earth and you could hold it in your hand.

It would adapt and learn your voice and those you are speaking to and translate in real time so you would hear what the other person says in your language via a speaker. They would also hear what you want to say in their language.

Thanks for the informative post. The kind of thing I eas thinking about was a dedicated device that you could carry on yourself that would have some kind of database of common spoken languages of say Earth and you could hold it in your hand.

If you have a smartphone, open your app store and search for "translator." There are a bunch of text and voice translator apps out there.

If you have a smartphone, open your app store and search for "translator." There are a bunch of text and voice translator apps out there.

I know about those but what if you didn't own a smartphone or are using a dumbphone, no cell coverage etc.

Plus, shitty/non-existent Romulan/Klingon Translation…

Seriously, though, I think Christopher is correct about;

It takes time to build mutual understanding between speakers of different languages who have never encountered each other before. You'd have to start with universal concepts like math and physics to begin establishing points of commonality, then build from there, which could take a lot of time.

I know about those but what if you didn't own a smartphone or are using a dumbphone, no cell coverage etc.

Then buy a smartphone. If you have the money to buy a machine that can do translation and nothing else, you'd probably be better off buying a machine that can do many different things.

If you don't have a signal, you're probably out of luck, since the database size and amount of real-time AI processing you'd need would be difficult to fit in a single device.

Yeah, like @Christopher said, it's basically not possible to learn an unknown language with a magical computer. I say basically, because 30 years ago we didn't think computers could do what they sometimes do now.
Having said that, we needed the Rosetta stone, which was WRITTEN language, which contained a language we did know to understand the written form of another that we didn't. It was a bit more complicated but that's the short of it. But that's written, and a dead language AKA we didn't know how to pronounce it.
So let's say, we come across an alien language in space and let the computer have a crack at it for 20 seconds.... no. Not unless this language was quite near to a couple of other languages that we do know how to speak and it got hits on common points.
So, you sit down. And point at a rock. You say rock a few times. The alien say something as well. You write the word down. They do. You point at that something sounds like rock. You repeat it. Then listen to them, write the word and record. And keep going.
Point in case.... Project Hail Mary, brilliant movie. Made it look as if it took a day or two for language matrix. Haven't read the novel but from what I understood it took months. And it wasn't perfect. Because A) it takes a lot longer than a few months and B) grammar and syntax can differ so much it might never properly line up.

Fuck it, I'm Dutch and for my little one I am learning German, which is my neighboring country. We share so many words, but the pronunciation of things can be so subtle and different. Most Germans would be ok with it but when you're trying to make they don't grow up with a bad accent.... So go figure what it's like for an alien language.

Having said that, we needed the Rosetta stone, which was WRITTEN language, which contained a language we did know to understand the written form of another that we didn't. It was a bit more complicated but that's the short of it. But that's written, and a dead language AKA we didn't know how to pronounce it.

Even figuring out what language was represented by the Linear B alphabet took about 70 years and the work of multiple scholars -- including my Uncle Emmett, who worked out the letter frequency tables that helped Michael Ventris finally determine it was Mycenean Greek. We still haven't figured out Linear A.

We would all need to lip sync for our lives because the universal translator in Trek seems to magically match actors' lip movements to what they're saying in Federation Standard.

We would all need to lip sync for our lives because the universal translator in Trek seems to magically match actors' lip movements to what they're saying in Federation Standard.

Most of the time, I could take that as a figurative simplification -- the Roddenberrian/Doylist interpretation that we're just seeing a dramatization of the "real" events with a fair amount of artistic license. Star Trek Beyond showed how it would "really" look and sound -- an alien speaking their own language while the translator voice was heard over it. The problem is with episodes like ENT: "Civilization," or implicitly any episode involving the crew disguising themselves as natives on an alien planet, where they use translators to pass as native speakers of the local language. That would never work; even aside from the lip-sync issue, a real-time machine translation wouldn't capture the nuances and idioms of the language and would probably sound strange to native speakers in its syntax and word choices. At most, they could pass for foreigners with moderate fluency in the local language.

In my comedy-SF "Hub" stories that were published in Analog Magazine (which I originally conceived as a sitcom premise, so I thought in terms of how to make it work in performance), the characters have implanted translators, so that they actually speak the translated words with their own mouths (or other vocal apparatus).

Wouldn't reading & understanding Alien Text be another giant problem all together?

I don't see how the Universal Translator allows anybody to easily understand written text with aliens that you just met.
Even if the UT figured out spoken language, written language is a seperate problem.

What happens if the alien stores written language in a form similar to Braille or some other non-standard written method like cuneiform?

Wouldn't reading & understanding Alien Text be another giant problem all together?

I think we've already covered that with our discussion of the Rosetta Stone and Linear A & B. It's pretty much impossible to decipher a writing system unless you can map it onto a known language.

Although it might help if the writing includes numbers, since math is universal and there are probably only a finite number of ways to represent numbers in writing (at least, I posited as much in one of my Hub stories). It's possible that could be used as a starting point for cracking the rest of the writing system, though maybe only if there's some kind of overlap between numbers and words. Then again, that might make things more confusing. If it's something like Roman numerals, say, identifying that X = 10 wouldn't help you decipher what "REX" means, because the numerical meaning and the phonetic meaning are completely unrelated.

Would telepathy between different species be difficult?
The UT, as far as I know, only works for spoken language & written languages.
To my knowledge, there isn't a telepathic UT.

If you use telepathy between different alien races, how would one understand what they're thinking.

Usually when you think in your head, it's in a language that you understand natively.

I doubt there is a universal Psionic language.

Would telepathy between different species be difficult?

In fiction, telepathy is a convenient handwave for such things, but realistically, it wouldn't help at all. You're right that the fictional conceit of some universal fundamental language that all brains share and that telepaths can read is nonsense. Every brain stores memories and information in a unique network of associations. While it's been shown to be possible to read certain things in people's brains like sensory perceptions, or perhaps words formulated in the speech center, you wouldn't be able to understand those words if you didn't know the language, and the underlying thoughts that the words express would be indecipherable, because another person's brain would have a different web of associations that would be even harder to interpret than spoken language. Language is how different minds are able to communicate with one another by agreeing on a common symbol system.

There's also the fact that brains are wobbly, squishy things that give off pretty faint signals, which is why reading people's brain activity requires putting electrodes directly on their heads or having them hold really still inside an MRI. Reading a moving person's brain activity on a detailed level from a distance and through environmental noise would be insanely difficult and would require a really large antenna, probably larger than a human body. Even if there were some undiscovered kind of "psionic" energy that brains gave off and that telepaths could read, the physical obstacles would still probably be the same.

The UT, as far as I know, only works for spoken language & written languages.
To my knowledge, there isn't a telepathic UT.

Except that when "Metamorphosis" introduced the universal translator, that's exactly how they said it did work, by reading the Companion's brain waves and interpreting what she was thinking. Since she was an incorporeal being, she had no spoken language, just pure thought.

There's also the fact that brains are wobbly, squishy things that give off pretty faint signals, which is why reading people's brain activity requires putting electrodes directly on their heads or having them hold really still inside an MRI. Reading a moving person's brain activity on a detailed level from a distance and through environmental noise would be insanely difficult and would require a really large antenna, probably larger than a human body. Even if there were some undiscovered kind of "psionic" energy that brains gave off and that telepaths could read, the physical obstacles would still probably be the same.

This makes the Vulcan Mind-Meld a more logical way of deep communication since there is a form of physical contact for the Psionic Energies to pass through.
Also, sharing of your Katra with the other person forms a closer bond in the future.

Where as normal Telepathy in ST is treated like a Psionic equivalent to the Standard Voice-Only Communicator but with some "hand wavium" for common understanding of language despite different spoken languages between the vast majority of species.

At least with Sarek's multi light-year communique with Michael in the opening eps of DISCO, it was established that he had Mind-Melded with her when she was a child and that long distance Psionic communications like that was very straining on him, ergo their entire conversation was limited to 2-3 minutes which is pretty amazing given the vast distances.
I'm assuming a small piece of Sarek's katra was in Michael which allowed him to easily make the Psionic link with her.

Except that when "Metamorphosis" introduced the universal translator, that's exactly how they said it did work, by reading the Companion's brain waves and interpreting what she was thinking. Since she was an incorporeal being, she had no spoken language, just pure thought.

Wasn't that a temporary modification to the UT by Spock?
Spock literally MacGyvered the UT to allow them to speak to the Companion.

This makes the Vulcan Mind-Meld a more logical way of deep communication since there is a form of physical contact for the Psionic Energies to pass through.

Perhaps, but it doesn't solve the coding problem I mentioned, that each brain stores information in its own idiosyncratic way, so you'd still need some kind of mutually understood code such as language to allow the two minds to understand each other. I suppose a species that evolved to be telepathic would logically have evolved such a form of shared coding for mind-to-mind communication, but it shouldn't work with other species.

At least with Sarek's multi light-year communique with Michael in the opening eps of DISCO, it was established that he had Mind-Melded with her when she was a child and that long distance Psionic communications like that was very straining on him, ergo their entire conversation was limited to 2-3 minutes which is pretty amazing given the vast distances.
I'm assuming a small piece of Sarek's katra was in Michael which allowed him to easily make the Psionic link with her.

But long-range Vulcan telepathy was established long before that in "The Immunity Syndrome," where Spock felt the deaths of the Intrepid crew from parsecs away. So it doesn't require a previous meld, if the "signal" is intense enough, like the death throes of hundreds at once. (The same principle as Obi-Wan Kenobi sensing the destruction of Alderaan.)

Wasn't that a temporary modification to the UT by Spock?
Spock literally MacGyvered the UT to allow them to speak to the Companion.

"COCHRANE: What's the theory behind this device?"
"KIRK: There are certain universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. This device instantaneously compares the frequency of brainwave patterns, selects those ideas and concepts it recognises, and then provides the necessary grammar."

Spock only adjusted it because it was designed to work on "more congruent life forms," but Kirk said that its fundamental operation was based on reading brain waves. Again, this was the episode that introduced the concept of the universal translator, so that was the way Gene Coon originally intended it to work. Any other interpretation is a later retcon.

Perhaps, but it doesn't solve the coding problem I mentioned, that each brain stores information in its own idiosyncratic way, so you'd still need some kind of mutually understood code such as language to allow the two minds to understand each other. I suppose a species that evolved to be telepathic would logically have evolved such a form of shared coding for mind-to-mind communication, but it shouldn't work with other species.

Maybe that's why the Mind-Meld isn't perfect, there has been plenty of cases where a Mind-Meld doesn't provide clear concise communication within ST's long history between different species.

But long-range Vulcan telepathy was established long before that in "The Immunity Syndrome," where Spock felt the deaths of the Intrepid crew from parsecs away. So it doesn't require a previous meld, if the "signal" is intense enough, like the death throes of hundreds at once. (The same principle as Obi-Wan Kenobi sensing the destruction of Alderaan.)

But wasn't that one-way where the Intrepid Crew was psionically shouting outwards in general & Spock just happened to be in range to receive it?
Spock wasn't having a two-way conversation with them, he was just feeling the Intrepid Crew's Psionic Mental Dialogue leaking out due to their grim situation?

"COCHRANE: What's the theory behind this device?"
"KIRK: There are certain universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. This device instantaneously compares the frequency of brainwave patterns, selects those ideas and concepts it recognises, and then provides the necessary grammar."

Spock only adjusted it because it was designed to work on "more congruent life forms," but Kirk said that its fundamental operation was based on reading brain waves. Again, this was the episode that introduced the concept of the universal translator, so that was the way Gene Coon originally intended it to work. Any other interpretation is a later retcon.

So the UT is supposed to have a BCI (Brain Computer Interface) / BMI (Brain Machine Interface).
Is it one-way where the Machine reads the information from the wearer but doesn't feed back any to the brain directly?
Cause I've only seen the UT solve that by playing back the translated language to the wearer.

Also one-way reading does make it safer since you're not messing with the wearers brain by feeding back info directly.

Similar to how modern Noise Canceling in Head-Phones works, it functions fast enough that it should be imperceptible & offer minimal lag between spoken word & reception of the translated audio to the wearer.