Lingual-translator

After my recent bad experience with the 1980 movie version of Flash Gordon, I decided to cleanse my palate with The Lion Men of Mongo, a 1974 novel supposedly based more closely on the original comic strip (which I haven't yet read, so I can't say if that's true or not). I'm only a few chapters in, but I've noticed the author (Ron Goulart writing as "Con Steffanson") going to some trouble to provide explanations for things I'll bet the comic strip just left unexplained, including at least one of linguistic interest.

Having just crashed on Mongo, Flash is trying to meet up with Dr. Zarkov and Dale. He finds proof that Mongo is inhabited by intelligent humanoids.

The dead man had been hanging there a good while. Birds and insects and time had been at work on him. The thick chains which held his wrists and ankles together were rusted, the rope which had broken his neck was now a greasy black. His clothes had lost most of their resemblance to clothes and were filthy strips and tatters.

But the sign in crude black letters tacked to his chest was still quite legible: He possessed a forbidden weapon.

Five miles further on, Flash finds another hanged man.

The sign on his chest announced: Executed by order of Emperor Ming. He stole food.

At this point, I'd noticed that Flash was reading signs in a language he couldn't possibly know and already decided I wasn't going to be bothered by it—I don't expect novels adapted from 30's adventure comic strips to touch all of the bases. It apparently bothered Goulart, though (assuming I'm right and this bit wasn't in the comic strip), because a few paragraphs later he's got this explanation:

After a few more minutes, [Flash] added [to himself], "At any rate, Zarkov will be happy to know his lingual-translator works." Prior to the initial trip to the Mongo System of planets, the doctor had had a microminiaturized device implanted in Flash, Dale, and himself. He guaranteed it would translate any written or spoken language they encountered and enable them to respond in kind.

Not only does this wonderful device give Flash the ability to translate Mongoese (or whatever they call it), it also gives him a wealth of typographic knowledge—he apparently recognizes the writing on the first corpse as "crude", but can still read it. That's pretty nifty. I also like how Zarkov "guarantees" that the lingual-translator will work, like a con man in a medicine show. Come to think of it, if the device gives its user the ability to read any language, even alien ones, it presumably would work just as well with your pitiful Earthling, sorry, Earth languages. Does it give Flash the ability to understand, speak, read, and write Chinese? And how about encrypted texts? Such a device would have to be able to instantly process unfamiliar languages based on no data, which is magic, so why not?

Writers of fantastic fiction are faced with this problem all the time: the Earthly heroes encounter folks whose language they have no business being able to speak or understand. To be realistic, the author would have to stop the action for about a year while one side or the other goes through a thorough language immersion program, but that doesn't seem likely to help the pacing of the story. There's a variety of solutions, including translator characters, characters who are improbably good at picking up new languages, and so forth. In pulpy adventure stories like Flash Gordon, I think the best solution is simply to never mention the problem and assume everybody manages to communicate somehow. Trying to explain it away with implanted framistats just focuses my attention on the problem and puts an unnecessary strain on my suspenders of disbelief.

[BTW, I plan to write about the Star Trek episode "Darmok" at some point. The Star Trek universe also has a "universal translator", but it doesn't always work as advertised...]

[Now playing: "Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service]

Comments

[Matt Cheney]

This is a great topic -- have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's short story "The Translator" (I think that's the title -- the book I have it in is in a box in another house, so I don't have access to it at the moment). It was published in Robert Silverberg's Universe 1 anthology in 1990, and has probably been reprinted in one of Robinson's collections. A very funny (as I remember it) take on the problems of a "universal translator".

[language hat]

Framistat? I always thought it was frammistan. Hmm... upon googling, I find framistat is more common than framistan, but frammistan is more common than frammistat. Go figure.

[Translate]

Same here - Framistat, come on... I was 100% sure it was frammistan. I guess i can use some internal translation here. I mean, translation between left and right brain. I guess... And, yes, framistat is more frequent than framistan, which makes the fact that frammistan is more common than frammistat even more crazy. I guess I will never translate this. Yeah, its nuts.

Sergei
---------------
Slowly Translate your brains out!
---------------

[Alfredo Fernández]

Well, about the action needing to be stopped for a while...

Do you remember Larry Niven's Known Space automatic translation machines? The point is taking a capable machine, instead of a human, through that immersion course.

Actually, the action did stop while the hero's device processed whatever the aliens were saying on a first encounter, enabling him to talk back to them in a matter of minutes.

No matter how advanced this technology may seem though, it's not magic, since the hero often spots missing/untranslated words et al :)

Such a device made Louis Wu the de facto first human-to-Trinoc ambassador in There is a tide. That is, IIRC.

[al]

Frammistan all the way, and I'm old enough to have been around when they were sold with used '49 Caddies with "low mileage, only driven to church on Sundays by a little old lady".