So today, I watched Knight's Tale

[conuly]

And Brave New World. And, a commercial for Stargate... Atlantis? Um, what? Did I completely miss this? What is this, when is this, is it any good, do we know if it's any good yet, why haven't I heard about it?

Comments

[conuly]

Interesting, intersting.

As hoped, the lost city is indeed a treasure trove of advanced technology, which includes such things as a universal translation device. Each team member travelling off-world receives one, which is capable of instantly translating virtually any language encountered.

But five bucks says it only works with spoken languages. No signed languages, certainly nothing chemical.

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

Did you ever see the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in which they had a treaty negotiator who only "spoke" in sign? Their universal translator didn't work with it, and they couldn't communicate with him when his translators were killed.

[conuly]

That episode still pisses me off, even more than the Darmok one. Of course, universal translators are crap. There's NO WAY they could work the way they do in the Star Trek world. In fact, there's slim odds on anything even remotely similar working ANYwhere.

What WOULD be cool is if they kinda made you specially telepathic, so you could learn another language from inside the head of the person to whom you were speaking... that's at least as believable as all the telepaths in the Star Trek world.

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

There's always Babel fish.

[conuly]

Makes as much sense as anything else.

[squittycat.livejournal.com]

The UT in Enterprise is a lot more believable; as far as I can tell, it has to be programmed for each particular language, and produces some sort of output that still needs to be "interpreted" by a skilled operator, in this case Hoshi.

And if they need a UT in Atlantis, then it means everyone really was speaking English everywhere in the galaxy in SG-1. Sigh.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

That's why I liked SG1 having Daniel along for the ride - it was impractical within the bounds of a weekly TV show to *always* have him conversing in another language, but they at least made an effort to show that not everyone miraculously speaks the same language (ok, most were variants of Go'auld, but that made some sense within the series.)