You and translator microbes
or, Translator microbes and you
TVTropes maintains a distinction between Translation Convention and Translator Microbes.
In the case of the former, a story is presented in the expected dominant language of the target audience while it is obliquely implied that the characters are, in-universe, speaking some other language; no causal explanation is offered, and the substitution is to be interpreted as purely for the audience's convenience. In the case of the latter, a diegetic gadget performs real-time, lossless translation for all who are in range, with each affected character supposedly hearing exclusively their own most dominant language.
The categories appear clean: one is an extradiegetic sleight of hand, the other an in-universe technology. But I'd argue that the boundary between them is far more porous than it is solid, and that it is more useful to think of them, instead of as two separate concepts, as two points along a wider spectrum.
Take what is perhaps the central example of Translator Microbes in modern fiction: the TARDIS translation circuit on Doctor Who1, which canonically telepathically hacks into the brain of anyone it comes into contact with and causes everyone to perceive every single spoken sentence they hear henceforth as being uttered in their personal most dominant language. Notably, the translation circuit's power apparently doesn't stop with in-universe characters. Time and time again, the show features dialogue, typically not involving the Doctor or their (statistically overwhelmingly Anglophone) companions, that is implicitly understood by us, the viewers, to be conducted in their entireties in Gallifreyan, Kaled, Classical French, or some other non-English language real or fictitious, with every speaker in such a conversation established to be proficient in the language in question. There is, therefore, no in-universe reason for the TARDIS translation circuit to be active in these particular scenes as no one present would need its assistance, and yet nearly every time such dialogue occurs it is rendered in English, the production language of the show. The explanation all but explicitly endorsed by the show itself is that the TARDIS is translating for the viewer in these instances, that the telepathic circuit housed inside that blue box reaches out of your TV screen and hacks into your brain as much as it does Rose Tyler's whenever it deems necessary2.
Of course, everybody can grok that the Doylist rather than Watsonian explanation is that the show is by-and-large made by a crew, and for a target audience, that speak English, and that the producers would simply like to not have to hire only actors that are, say, fluently multilingual in modern English and pre-revolutionary French or to pay language consultants to make Gallifreyan into a fully-fledged conlang. But under this lens, the explicitly stated purpose for Translator Microbes being brought in as a plot device—that it's for the Doctor's provincial Terran companion to fit in more easily in whatever far-flung locale in time and space they happen to find themself in this week, that it's for the plot to be able to progress more quickly and fluidly, that it's for the scripts not to be bogged down by the Doctor needing to chime in as a consecutive interpreter every other goddamn line—diminishes. The translator microbes function primarily as a fig leaf, covering, with an acknowledging wink, the fact that what they wanted to do was Translation Convention from the get go.
I don't mean to imply that this fact is somehow obscure to the general audience, but I'd wager that it is truly viscerally felt by the subset of viewers who work in translation and interpretation. The dissonance lies in the fact that the output from Translator Microbes, within the Whoniverse and without, is almost always too perfect. Impossibly perfect. Perfect in a way that any real-world attempt at translation can only ever hope to asymptotically approach, not replicate. Many have likely seen the following image being paraded around online as a reason cited for why genuinely simultaneous interpretation remains unfeasible even with the help of powerful AI:
In the first example, the word order in the German sentence doesn't match up to that of its equivalent English sentence because any verb that isn't the lone finite verb in the main clause of a sentence is, in German, obligatorily moved to the final position in the clause that it's in. In the case of the English sentence, the finite verb in the main clause is want; the non-finite verb that follows it is to try on; whereas saw, despite also being finite, is placed in a subordinate clause. This means that the German equivalents of to try on and saw, namely anprobieren and gesehen habe, have to be shifted to the very ends of their respective clauses. The best German-to-English simultaneous interpreter in the world, human or machine, would therefore need to wait for a German speaker to say the sentence out in its entirety before they can decide on a word that, in the eventual English output, would occur a mere 40% of the way into the sentence3.
In the second example, our poor nonexistent interpreter is further thwarted by the fact that, while English allows both left and right branching, Chinese is an obligatorily head-final language that only allows left branching. In other words, modifiers in Chinese simply must come before whatever they're modifying. Just as saw modifies the object suit, in a shop modifies the action saw, across the street modified the location shop, and from our hotel modifies the relational prepositional phrase across the street. Every single constituent in the noun phrase suit I saw in a shop across the street from our hotel therefore shows up in its Chinese equivalent in almost the exact reverse order. The interpreter, sick of complaints that their interpretation is not simultaneous enough, can say Fuck it and produce the output I want to try on a from-our-hotel-across-the-street-shop-in-saw suit4. And then they'll probably lose their job right then and there.
In the third example, the interpreter, already wary now of left-branching head-final languages, is faced with a yet more dastardly conundrum: whereas English, German, and Chinese all have subject–verb–object as their default word order, Japanese has subject–object–verb. The main verb of the sentence comes last, something even German categorically forbids. Until the Japanese speaker finishes the whole sentence, no listener, be they our interpreter or otherwise, even knows what the hell the subject I even does or wants to do!
Now, granted, within Doctor Who, the TARDIS is a sapient time machine that perceives every point in time, actual or potential, all at once. The reason that the simultaneous interpretation she provides is so perfect can be hand-waved away as that she knows exactly what complete sentence you intend to say5 before you've even said it, and simply syncs her output in time with your actual utterance. But there are plenty of works featuring Translator Microbes that do not have time travel as a handy excuse to fall back upon. And that is not to mention the ubiquity of conversations in such works canonically established to be taking place in multiple languages, among a linguistically diverse group of characters, with the inferred help of Translation Microbes, in which things like puns, rhymes, sound form-based wordplay and dad jokes, idioms, culture-specific expressions, and comedic or dramatic misunderstandings due to polysemous or homophonous words all land perfectly! These are all things that, if they were to be even workably preserved in translation, let alone beautifully, would take more luck than skill on the translator's part. So either the translator microbes are doing so much heavy lifting that it's tantamount to tailoring the contents of reality for each individual conversant present—and don't forget the viewer, going way above and beyond the call of duty for anything that can be deemed a translator6, or we have to unsuspend our disbelief and contend with the only possibility that could allow this: that contrary to canon, these characters are all speaking the same language.
And that that language, crucially, can really be nothing other than actual, honest-to-god modern English7.
A translating mechanism that never misfires is indistinguishable from the whole story simply having been written in the target language all along. Works that incorporate Translator Microbes into their universes rarely let the microbes do anything remotely akin to actual translation. They serve the cultural function of letting writers and audiences treat their own dominant language as any narrative's unquestioned ground state.
Serious multilingual nuances and complexities, which the real world offers in abundance, are cordoned off into a one-line tech explanation and forgotten. Category mismatches, unaligned conventions surrounding conversational maxims, and the fact that different languages have different approaches as to which grammatical features to encode explicitly and which ones to leave unspoken (unspoken, yes, but still very much mutually understood amongst a speaker population)8 are all things that will inevitably arise occasionally in multilingual communications, even with maximally competent interpreters present. I consider these subtle potential discrepancies to be more than capable of creating their own kind of dramatic tension and even of propelling plot beats forward. But the default faultlessness of Translator Microbes does not showcase a way of realistically and elegantly overcoming these hurdles; it reifies the perspective of a life-long monolingual and denies the possibility of their existence. Everywhere they go, the microbes all end up saying one thing: It's okay, there's no need for anyone to be anything more than a monoglot. Least of all you.
Despite the median American probably speaking a grand total of something like 0.8 languages, humans who speak at least two languages proficiently constitute the majority worldwide, whereas genuine monolinguals are a minority. And yet, in spite of this, even works set in truly sophisticated multilingual settings surrender most bandwidth to one hegemonic language. That language then remains, even in sci-fi/fantasy IPs that aim to showcase dizzying degrees of cultural diversity, to the target consumer as water is to fish, with other tongues relegated to ornamental status. The unquestioned, implicit rulesets of the hegemonic language, unconsciously taken for granted by its speaker population, are assumed to be the right ways to go about things, while languages that go about things differently are looked at with a vaguely fetishizing gaze or marked as deviant or special owing to these differences—if any attention is even drawn to them at all.
My master's-thesis advisor once recounted to me how an American kid of about ten—an acquaintance's child, who at that time was surely no more than a year or two into his first venture into the study of foreign languages—once barged into his parents' room, wide-eyed, claiming to have just had an absolutely mind-blowing epiphany. “I just realized”, he said to his mom and dad, lowering his voice, “that English is the only real language in the world.” At the request of his amused parents for an elaboration, he explained, “Because anything in any other language can be translated into something in English.” I'd wager that, now that years have gone by, the kid has renounced his groundbreaking assertion9 (and the moment he finally stopped believing it probably felt to him like grasping object permanence for the first time). But I would like to make the point that, until you begin to seriously contemplate the implications of the overwhelming majority of text in these IPs that transport you to far-flung, fantastical worlds being presented, ostensibly perfectly and losslessly, in your dominant language for your convenience, you are pretty much still thinking like this kid.
And just about every piece of media you're likely to encounter and consume will still invite you to. You know that, when you open up a copy of The Lord of the Rings, you are not in fact reading a story that was “originally written” predominantly in Westron, and that J. R. R. Tolkien did not in fact “helpfully and kindly” translate all the Westron into modern English, all the Rohirric into Anglo-Saxon, and all the Dalian10 into Old Norse for you (whilst choosing to leave all the Sindarin, Quenya, and Adûnaic unaltered). You know without the shadow of a doubt that the “Westron”, “Rohirric”, and “Dalian” bits of the book—proper nouns, poetic verse, and all!—originated respectively as real-world modern English, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse inside his mind to begin with. Similarly, when flipping through the pages of Dune, you know that Frank Herbert did not spend countless hours laboring over the task of localizing a whole novel's worth of Imperial Standard Galach into its twenty-one-millennia-old ancestor language, 20th-century English; he wrote the damn book in 20th-century English. By acknowledging within their narratives that neither the Men and Hobbits of Middle-earth nor the Great Houses of the Landsraad in fact speak English, these authors are positioning their very selves as parts of their stories' conceits. They offer their identities up for you to envision them—so long as you wish to remain immersed in the stories' worlds for another minute—as translators, leaving it to you to then dutifully silence the part of your brain that tries to remind you that no translator can actually be this good.
Is there, then, even a true functional difference between what these authors endorse and the invocation of Translator Microbes as an in-universe plot device? Because the microbes, they do marvelous work. Unimpeachable work. For some reason, instead of beaming the actual knowledge to comprehend, to wield, to create in 57 billion languages into your brain, they ensure that you will only ever hear yours. Well—that is, when they're not exercising some seemingly-arbitrary-but-I'm-sure-actually-rather-principled judgment on which small number of languages to keep foreign for you. Once you let them in your head, it turns out that, whaddayaknow, people half a universe away in five random directions are all monolingual native speakers of your language all along. Your perspective is already central; the universe will bend to meet you.
You know what it's like to be assisted by these little things too. It doesn't just happen when Translator Microbes in a TV show break the fourth wall and reach you; it's what happens every time you voluntarily engage with and consume a story that relies on Translation Convention as well. The moment you open up a book, ready to commit to immersing yourself in its secondary world, a swarm of nanites, embedded in the very paper fibers you now touch, rush out into the air around you and enters your brain though your every pore and orifice, giving you no time to refuse. And it's done. The physical lines on the page, printed in ink, are in a creole language with an English substratum and Slavic superstratum that you wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of, written in a script that will not be invented or standardized for another ten thousand years. The image of them hits your retinae. But your brain perceives the signals it receives from your optic nerves as something else. One minute ago you would have stared at meaningless squiggles; now, you read. A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
Translation Convention and Translator Microbes lie on a continuum11 of narrative excuses for the same underlying maneuver: writing mainly in and for one language while pretending or attempting to honor many. In this series about how multilingualism as a phenomenon is represented in popular sci-fi/fantasy IPs, I intend not to taxonomize and sort different IPs along this continuum, but to ask, How frankly does the author acknowledge the default monolingual reader they have implicitly chosen to write for, and what narrative costs or evasions follow from that choice? What tensions arise between their elected approach and the realities of multilingualism as not only a real-world phenomenon but a daily experience for the majority of the human species? I'd like to try to tease out those hidden authorial decisions, to shed light on how these works, in their treatments of multilingualism, set out to shape the audience's empathy and epistemic humility. I want to peer inside the crevices in these works where genuine linguistic frictions survive in sparks and embers, and where they are papered over.
This is an intro to the series Tongues of the Imperium. More to come.
It even makes it, as of the time of this article's publishing, into the page-top quote for the TVTropes page on Translator Microbes!
Such leanings on the fourth wall are a mainstay in Doctor Who: c.f. the numerous shots in which no in-universe character is keeping an eye on a Weeping Angel and yet the Angel remains perfectly still in-frame rather than attacking its prey, for which the only suitable explanation is that the viewer is looking at the Angel in those moments.
This is also the basis of a joke well circulated among translators: a guy shows up ten minutes late to a speech being given in German (the guy doesn't speak German himself but is assured that his bilingual friend, who's also there, would interpret the whole thing for him), sits down next to his friend, and asks, “So, what have I missed? What has he been saying so far?”, to which the friend responds, “Shut up, I'm still waiting for the verb.”
Linguists actually do something rather similar to this called interlinear glossing when doing syntactic analyses and annotations.
Or even possibly that she knows the thoughts that form inside your head prior to the formation of any sentence—the ideas you intend to convey but which you are only capable of conveying at all by submitting yourself to language—and speaks on your behalf in a way that she deems most likely to cause the listener the same exact set of effects as your sentence, as you would have worded it, would cause a listener who speaks your language. Incidentally, this is essentially the goal I would argue any translator should aim in the direction of, but that's for a later post.
One wonders why, if the microbes are capable of such deeds, they don't just allow the participants in the conversation to do away with language entirely and communicate via wordless, lossless telepathy.
Or actual Mandarin. Or actual Japanese. Or actual, you know, whatever language is the production language of the work.
Or at least I bloody hope so.
There is some contention among Tolkien scholars surrounding the proper name for the language of Dale, but there's no way in hell I'm not calling it Dalian.
And they're not even the end points on the spectrum. Beyond Translation Convention lies the choice to go on record to say that the Common Tongue spoken in your non-Earth secondary world is, as a result of what can only be assumed to be a series of ludicrous historical coincidences and freakishly low-probability events on its developmental path, actually phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically identical to our world's English. George R. R. Martin, I'm looking right at you. My eventual post trying to justify how this even works in-universe will likely drive me legitimately mad.
My favorite take on this is Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky," where arachnoid aliens are translated culturally and linguistically to achingly wholesome WW2-era Britons by a group of linguists enslaved by an autism virus. We get to see them right-ho and chin-up with a few odd turns of phrase and the characters get to have that shattered when they see their chittering masses in the flesh.
Torchship, an upcoming TTRPG inspired by Star Trek, has a universal translator, which is mostly a narrative convenience but does actually have a few interesting wrinkles.
First, because it's psychic, it communicates the *intent* behind the words. If someone intends to lie to you, then their deception will be as natural as if they were speaking in English. Or if the intent is "I don't want you to understand this" - such as a code word or encrypted message - then it will fail to translate completely.
(This is exploited for *another* narrative convenience. Player characters speak both English and Russian, but are trained to only use Russian when speaking to other crew members. The universal translator recognizes the intent of "only meant for other crew" and refuses to translate Russian. This allows players to talk freely among themselves when dealing with NPCs.)
It also mentions that the translator can be "tuned" to be more or less literal - if it's overtuned, it will render people's names into English equivalents (like Tolkien "helpfully translating" Westron names into something familiar) and convert idioms into similar English ones, and if it's undertuned it gives you awkwardly literal phrasings. So for best results you still want someone who learned the language the old-fashioned way.