Untranslatable even by a universal translator

One of the most important things to the storylines of the long-running TV series Star Trek is that there's a universal translator. For those who don't know, it's a scifi series set in the future, when basically social problems are sorted on Earth and everyone has enough to live on and people can just go into space because they want to and so there are these space ships that belong to the Federation that just go around space and meet people and solve their diplomatic issues or sometimes, like, just relieve their loneliness or meddle in their affairs or whatever it might be. They get involved in fights much more often than you'd think, given their mission. So they're obviously always encountering races that they've never met before who all have their own language and culture and often disastrous/hilarious misunderstandings ensue, but they can always speak each other's language. I imagine this is because it would be dull if every week they main plot line was basically Arrival. So this thing is part of their ship, or in their kit (there are lots of series) and it means that what it sounds like is everyone speaks English most of the time. 

Sometimes there are bits of language that aren't translated. So often you hear Klingon spoken - in the current reimagining, we saw lots of scenes without humans in, on board a Klingon ship, and there it made sense to have them speaking Klingon (after all, someone's gone to the bother of inventing it) and subtitle it. 

Another episode in the current series had the people 1000 years ahead of where our main character had come from speaking 'Pidgin'. That was an instance where the translator had evidently done a partial job. Pidgins arise in contact situations and typically have a 'lexifier' language which provides the vocabulary (in the context of slavery, where many pidgins and then creoles arose, this would be the colonisers' language, such as English) and another language influences the grammar (a West African language in the slavery context). (Well, this is one way of thinking about it. Let's go with it for now and you can read about creoles yourself if you want to - you should.) The 'Pidgin' (probably actually a creole, as it seems to be stable) in the series isn't discussed but it's probably developed from some kind of lingua franca, as there seems to be a lot of trading going on. The universal translator seems to have been able to pick out some features and translate them but not all, as it doesn't translate it to English. The question of why this particular language remains untranslatable whereas all the other unfamiliar languages don't is a puzzling one - it's not because it's in the future, as it copes with all the other languages they encounter. Perhaps it really is a pidgin, and therefore doesn't yet have fully stabilised patterns and rules, and so is not reliably translatable? Or perhaps they thought we wouldn't notice this inconsistency that was convenient for the story. 

Then, recently, the main character Michael Burnham sets up some kind of formal conversation where she needs an advocate. The process is called T'Kal-in-ket, and her advocate is called a shalankhkhai, which we learn was called sha-set but they now use this Romulan term, and it has to be someone from the Qowat Milat order of warrior nuns. Now, we often encounter borrowings in the series, and they're simply absorbed into the story and we're all good - that's how it works in real life too, when we talk about eating avocado or drinking pinot noir or wearing dungarees. But the characters from 'our' gang didn't know these words and they all had to be explained to them and the explanations were things like 'a type of advocate'. In other words, these were 'untranslatable' words, the kind of word that refers to a specific concept that doesn't have an exact match in English (or whatever you're translating to), so you need to explain it. Other examples are schadenfreude, or saudade, or hygge, and so on. Similar examples in real life are job titles like Sultan or Tsar, where it doesn't quite correspond to King or Prime Minister or President or something. Others are titles like 'Mrs' - this is frequently the translation given for 'Frau' in German (on forms, for instance). This is infuriating to English-speaking customers who are not married and would use 'Ms', as 'Mrs' can only mean a married person in English, whereas Frau, Madame, Señora, etc simply mean an adult woman rather than a girl, so they are not good translations. (If Frau or Mme were the option, that would be fine!) 

I don't know what language our crew are meant to be speaking - each their own language, I suppose, as they have a universal translator. I'd like to see a bit more of the translator running into difficulties and thereby causing a linguistic subplot. 

The Conversation: 'untranslatable' words tell us more about English speakers than other cultures

I wrote a piece for The Conversation recently, which I'm reposting here just in case you haven't seen it yet.

Language: 'untranslatable' words tell us more about English speakers than other cultures

Say what? Shutterstock

Laura Bailey, University of Kent
When the word “hygge” became popular outside Denmark a few years ago, it seemed the perfect way to express the feeling of wrapping yourself up in a crocheted blanket with a cosy jumper, a cup of tea and back-to-back episodes of The Bridge. But is it really only the Danes, with their cold Scandinavian evenings, who could have come up with a word for such a specific concept? And is it only the Swedes who could have needed the verb “fika” to describe chatting over a coffee?
The internet abounds with words that lack a single-word English equivalent. In order to be really lacking an English equivalent, it must be a single, indivisible unit of meaning, as phrases are infinitely productive and can be created on demand by combining different words. Take, for example, the claim by Adam Jacot de Boinod in I Never Knew There Was A Word For It, that Malay has a word for the gap between the teeth that English lacks: “gigi rongak”. Well, this appears to be a phrase, and it translates literally as the perfectly cromulent English phrase “tooth gap”.
In fact, English even has a single-word technical term for a gap between the teeth: “diastema”. Okay, that’s actually a Greek word, but it’s in use in English, so it’s also an English word. Does that matter?
Where we get our words from tells us something about our history. Take, for instance, Quechua – the language spoken by people indigenous to the Andes and the South American highlands. The Quechuan word for “book” is “liwru”, which comes from the Spanish word “libro”, because Spanish colonisers introduced written forms of language to the people they conquered. In fact, English does now have a word for “hygge” – it’s “hygge”.

Cultures in language

It is often said that Eskimos have 50 words for snow, but it’s a myth that has been comprehensively dismantled, probably first of all by Laura Martin in 1986. “Eskimo” is a somewhat meaningless term anyway, but the structure of the languages spoken by peoples such as the Inuit or Aleut in the Arctic Circle are very synthetic, meaning that each “word” may comprise many parts or “morphemes”.
Entire phrases can be contained within words in these languages – a single “word” may literally mean “fallen snow”. For that reason, “having 50 words for snow” in these languages is about as remarkable as having 50 sentences to talk about snow in English.

The ‘50 words for snow’ fallacy is a perfect example of misreading a culture. Shutterstock

And yet the myth and others like it snowball, because we are fascinated by the idea that language reveals something about our psyche – or perhaps even determines it. The economist Keith Chen has devoted some considerable effort to demonstrating that speakers of languages that grammatically encode the future and the present separately behave more recklessly with respect to their health and money. He argues that it shows that overt future tense marking makes a speaker more aware of the future as a separate time from the present and thus more distant, which has a corresponding effect on behaviour.
Many linguists have some reservations about his conclusions, but the main claim hit the news and people were intrigued by the idea.

False cultural judgements

While careful experimentation has shown that having words for concepts makes them easier or faster to name, it is not true that lacking a concept means you cannot conceive of it, and vice versa. For instance, many languages have gender-neutral pronouns (the same word is used for he and she) but are spoken in cultures with very poor levels of gender equality.
This might seem obvious – it’s Orwell’s Newspeak (from 1984) in action. In Orwell’s dystopia, the word “free” was stripped of all meaning of individual freedoms and could be used only in the sense of a dog being free from lice, which in turn was supposed to remove the ability of the citizens of Oceania to conceive of such freedom. But it is not just science fiction. There is an important note of caution that linguists are always aware of: making claims about other cultures risks “exoticising” them.

A mural depicting indigenous people in Arizona. Shutterstock

At worst, this results in racism. The Hopi people of Arizona, who are sometimes claimed to have no way to express time based on a misunderstanding of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s work on their language, were assumed by some to be incapable of following bus timetables or arriving at work on schedule, a mistaken belief that led to obvious problems.
But even an apparently benign conclusion about how some Australian languages encode space with compass directions (“north”) rather than ego-relative position (“my left-hand side”) suggests English speakers often miss out on knowledge about language and cognition because they are busy measuring things against an arbitrary English-centric benchmark. Different language conventions are usually not exotic or unusual; it’s just that English speakers come from a position of very great privilege because their language is the default. People who speak other languages are seen as different, as outsiders.

I’m not a total killjoy. I still delight in “untranslatable” words. It’s something special to learn a word and along with it make concrete a nebulous but recognisable concept like hygge, or indeed its wonderfully chilling opposite, uhygge. I just suggest a position of healthy scepticism when you meet claims that a language has “no word for X” or “50 words for Y”, or, as the internet recently got excited about, that “tag” stands for “touch and go” (sorry folks, it doesn’t).
Laura Bailey, Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, University of Kent
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.