The universal translator was broken and Uhura, plus two engineers and half the Comms crew on the ship were trying to
fix it. Lt. Hawkins was still on the bridge because he was the only one who had any in-depth knowledge of the family of languages
that they were dealing with.
This, Uhura thought, was why they had the translator. While there were those that disagreed,
saying that no computer could ever convey all of the meanings and context different languages had to offer, not the way another
living being could, it meant that they didn’t have to have a specialist for each language group on board, which was
good for deep space missions. If you had to have a specialist for each language and then there was an accident, your whole
mission could be in jeopardy.
Of course, the people who didn’t like the translator tended to be out of work language
specialists.
The opposite problem was one that Uhura acknowledged. Having the Universal Translator did mean that you
could be tempted not to learn other languages but she didn’t understand why you’d do that to yourself, missing
out on whole sections of the world because you couldn’t be bothered. Starfleet’s language programme for non-Comms
specialists was still remiss in that area as far as she was concerned. Knowing a bit of everything was fine in theory, everyone
picked up bits of Vulcan, Klingon and English, but that way, who would ever pick up Tellarite? Uhura didn’t like it
as a language, too loud, abrupt and harsh, but Francine who was with her in Advanced Xenolinguistics had loved it, said it
had the same sort of poetry as a storm at sea. The idea of losing that difference of understanding was horrific to her. You
lost so many things when you lost a language, different ways of seeing the world. Even on Earth the number of languages they’d
lost were countless, and to do that to rest of Starfleet seemed perverse.
Of course the universal translator wasn’t
perfect, it had problems with idioms, but that’s what idioms where, things where at best you could hope to get across
the general meaning rather than the specific. Uhura had always thought it would be McCoy who’d break the translator,
she heard it buzzing with feedback every time he launched into a tirade, but it coped remarkably well. On those occasions
where she’d had to translate manually for him, people seemed to take comfort in his tone, even while they said things
like ‘those Starfleet doctors are strange’. She didn’t feel the need to translate that back to him.
In
the end though, it wasn’t McCoy who broke it but the Captain, not that they were sure how he’d done it. It wasn’t
like the language that the people they were dealing with was difficult per se, it was a variant on Bolian, but it was different
enough that the translation software was having to run at maximum to try to figure out the grammar for it, and then Jim had
said something, something very Iowa-dialect, and it had fused. Right now, about a quarter of the ship’s company were
having to make do with their third or fourth languages to make themselves understood. The small-minded amongst the linguistic
community would probably call that a reason for creating a Starfleet-wide standard, but whatever they chose, however they
made it, there’d always be people whose first language was part of a language group that wasn’t represented fully,
and then they might have to cope with sounds that they couldn’t fully make. Uhura had been in that position, trying
to learn Cantonese and her mouth didn’t cope well with some of those sounds, no matter how hard she tried.
No,
a galactic standard wasn’t the way, even if it meant that English seemed to be creeping up to fill that gap. If there
had to be a language doing that, she’d rather it be her beloved Swahili, but she granted that she had a bias there.
They
seemed to be getting close to solving the problem, with Scotty animatedly talking about parts of the circuit returning to
life, and Ensign M’Ress was able to make herself understood without resorting to English.
It was probably just
as well, since Hawkins was getting that look on his face, the one Uhura assumed that she frequently got, where you could tell
he was thinking of strangling the Captain because instead of thinking of what he was saying he’d come out with some
piece of either idiom, dialect or jargon that could not be translated and Hawkins was having to come up with words in a language
he spoke imperfectly that conveyed the exact meaning of what Kirk had said, even if that meaning wasn’t all that obvious.
If only people would think more before they spoke.
