Universal Translator

Universal Translator

Science fiction stories set in an alien-rich future often show the universe's different species communicating seamlessly by means of (what in the Star Trek universe is called) a "Universal Translator."

The technology to instantly translate a known, human language is today a reality (though a rough and buggy one). But the science fiction "universal translator" is able to instantly and perfectly translate even previously unknown alien languages. Disbelief cannot be suspended quite so far: at the very least the translator would struggle and make mistakes along the way as it pieced together a language sound by sound.

My "Universal Translator" is as much a fantasy as Star Trek's, but it acknowledges some of the difficulties of language and translation, and the fact that language as we know it evolved from and is deeply connected to ancient metaphors that a machine translator would have difficulty distinguishing from the words' denotative intent.

The transcription is first just human interpretations of sound (represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet), then as it decodes the roots of words, the story seems to be a mythological tale of a mother-goddess protecting her child. Though myths charm us, they are often rooted in suffering and violence: slowly the narrative unfolds to reveal a message of a civilization destroyed, which must, to save itself, destroy us.

To build this project, I invented an imagined alien language.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• universal translator
• video
• poetry
• narrative
• story
• fiction

[cineslims]

Bananas. Excellent execution of the realities of translation and potential fictions of alien invasions.

[danhesketh]

That was incredible. What a way to deliver a story.