The universal
translator is a classic Star Trek plot device that makes encounters with
alien civilizations much less awkward. "Alienese" goes in and
American English comes out — at least on television in 1967.
But that's just television. When a Professor of Biological
Anthropology and Linguistics starts talking about it, however, that's something
worth taking a closer look at.
Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, posits that all language has a universal structure. Regardless of whether the
aliens communicate with sounds, pictures or even odors, there must be a set of
rules that govern the communication.
One common way to denote an object, for example, involves
pointing to it and then emitting an expression. Whether you use an index
finger, a tentacle or antennae, you've just directly referenced the object.
Professor Deacon argues that even abstract symbols can be
understood as referencing words that point directly to real objects in the physical
world we all share. If that is true, it should be possible to have a device
that uses software to tease apart the symbols of a completely alien language
and then determine how they reference the world; in other words, a universal
translator.
Other science-fictional references to the idea of a
universal translator for alien speech include the famous Babel Fish from
Douglas Adams' 1979 novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the translator discs
from Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld.
As far as I know, the first science-fictional reference to
the idea of automatic speech translation is found in Hugo Gernsback's 1911
classic Ralph
124c 41 +. It only worked for human languages, though; appropriately, it was
called a language
rectifier. The first real-life efforts in the area of automated language
translation came about in the late 1940's, as US intelligence agencies
struggled with a mass of Russian language documents.
(This Science Fiction in the News story used with
permission of Technovelgy.com)
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