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'Babelfish' to translate alien tongues could be built

If we ever make contact with intelligent aliens, we should be able to build a universal translator to communicate with them, according to a linguist and anthropologist in the US. picked by AutumnLotus 6 months ago

tags bablefish translate alien tongues translator communicate

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29	punthe

6 months ago

Babelfish is great! I use it for all of my translation needs.

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14	bcgrote

6 months ago

We discussed this at LOSCon last year. This is rather Terra-centric thinking, that alien tongues would be predicated on noun/verb formats that could 'easily' be translated by a simple mechanism such as Babelfish, which is known to be rather inept at best.

Add to that the cultural translations, and you could easily start a huge mess with a poor translation.

"The wine is fine, but the meat has gone bad." My favorite example of a bad translation. The original phrase in English was "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." It was translated into Russian, then back to English.

We really don't want to say "Yo Mama wears combat boots." to a group that has mastered interstellar travel. At the very least, they could have mean friends!

I have never gotten a satisfactory translation out of Babel fish. Or even a towel.

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11	ieldanth

6 months ago

What if they don't even use audible language? What if they communicate like ants, through chemicals?

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11	digitalg...

6 months ago

pfft, interwebs translators can't even translate HUMAN languages reliably.

See...

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