Translator Microbes - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Babel Fish

A special kind of Applied Phlebotinum that makes the characters in space travel shows all speak the same language. Must also be used when shows go to other countries and, strangely, everyone there is speaking unaccented English. A fascinating side effect is that not only does the listener hear the words in English, but the speakers' lips move to form the corresponding phonemes.

This is distinct from the phenomenon of alien/foreign characters appearing to speak English to each other when no English-speaking characters are around; see Translation Convention.

The real problem with this is that if the aliens were really using translator microbes, they would appear to be dubbed over like in a foreign film rather than merely speaking English. (A good example of this occurs near the start of the 1980s Dune.)

This trope not only predates television, it predates most literature. One of the earliest known instances of it can be found in True History by Lucian of Samosata. Written in the 2nd century AD, this story includes adventures in outer space, where everybody speaks Greek (of course). An even earlier example is The Gift of Tongues given to the Apostles at Pentecost in The Acts of the Apostles. After the Holy Spirit comes to them, they address a large crowd drawn from many different nations, and everybody hears them speaking his own language. The members of the crowd are astonished that the people doing this are all Gallileans (normally assumed to be uneducated rustics).

Almost all Trapped In Another World stories will postulate that Translator Microbes are part of the magical nature of this other world. No justification is required or expected, although it's often good to have some kind of Hand Wave to point out that it's not "realistic."

A well-done page on this is here

See also Aliens Speaking English. Compare Bilingual Dialogue.

Examples

Anime

The Hinman in The Twelve Kingdoms act as Translator Microbes as a secondary function (their primary giving the owner kick ass martial art skills).
This is Mokona's special power in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. Since the cast themselves are from 3 different worlds, if they get separated from him, they can't even understand each other.
A similar thing happens in Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind. The Torumekians & Eftal peoples speak whatever the series has been translated into, whereas the Doroks speak a strange language written in apparently made-up characters. Very few characters are bilingual & rely on the telepathic powers of Psykers like Nausicaa or Chikuku to translate & are at a great loss without them.

Comic Books

In Silver Age DC comics (mainly Legion Of Superheroes) alien characters either spoke a common language called Interlac, or used "telepathic earplugs" to understand each other.

Film

Justified in the movie The Last Starfighter. One of the first things that happens to Our Hero once he arrives at the Starfighter base is a small disk attached to his lapel (how would the aliens know to attach it there, when they all wear jumpsuits?) The disc looks like it was cut out of a circuit board, and supposedly translates brain waves so that Our Hero hears perfect English, even though that's what not being actually spoken. Amazing how once the disk is attached, the actual alien noises all go away and the rest of the movie is in English... and yes, we DID hear alien speech before the disk is attached.
Star Wars averts this in having C3P0, a protocol droid fluent in over 6 million forms of communication, who interprets for the characters (especially for Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi and for the main characters so they can speak with the Ewoks).
- Interestingly, in one re-release, Jabba's dialog in ROTJ was given subtitles too. It was eventually realized that this made C-3P0 entirely superfluous, and it was dropped in later releases.
- Also most characters are bilingual or trilingual and able to understand each other, the reason that many speak their native language is that they are unable to speak galactic Basic. See Bilingual Dialogue.
Subverted in Star Trek VI where the crew of the Enterprise, trying to get past Klingon border guards in order to rescue Kirk and McCoy, don't use the universal translator because the Klingons would somehow be able to tell. The fact that the Klingons didn't notice the really slow and rough translations from Uhura as she thumbed her way through an English-Klingon dictionary must mean that the universal translator is pretty awful.

Literature

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy uses the Babel Fish, though in this case the ridiculous nature of the translation device (inserted in the ear) probably means its use is satirical — like most things in H2G2. The Babel Fish online translator is named after this fish.
In The Dresden Files, a demon trying to tempt Harry into losing his soul provides translation as one of several favors it does for Harry. He knows he shouldn't keep relying on it, but...
The Pendragon Adventure begins with Bilingual Dialogue - Uncle Press and a Denduron native communicate while understanding each other perfectly. Once Bobby's Traveler nature kicks in, he gains the ability to read and understand the languages of all the other Territories. Presumably, it applies to acolytes too, since Mark and Courtney get messages from Spader, Aja and others that are somehow in English. Possibly they are translated by the rings used to send the messages between territories, given that when acolytes use them they are addressed to a specific person, not a territory in general.
In Animorphs, all Andalites in the military have translator chips implanted in their brains that can translate any language after a brief exposure to it. In addition, their "thought speak" can be understand by any sentient being, because it communicates concepts in addition to specific words.
In Timeline, the time travelers had earpieces that translated for them. The problem was that only one of them actually knew how to talk in period and he was pretty shaky at it (he was a history buff/archeologist) so for the most part they could understand (reasonably, the translators weren't perfect) but not speak without sounding crazy.
Subverted in the Empire of Man series. Although the majority of the translation is provided by toots (computers implanted in the user's brain), the toot still needs to have something with one or two degrees of relation to the language in use before it can start trying to translate. And even then, things aren't smooth - they find out in March To the Stars that the original language sample they've been working from all along has been stratigically edited to make all mentions of the locals' new religious habits incredibly euphemistic. Since the locals are now ritualistic cannibals and they're asking for Prince Roger's girlfriend as a sacrifice, Prince Roger is, understandably, Not Pleased to find this out. It doesn't end well for the locals. Additionally, since the native Mardukans lack toots entirely, they have to learn all languages and dialects the hard way.
The wizards in the Young Wizards series can use the Speech to make themselves understood by all beings (non-wizard listeners usually perceive it as being in their native tongue) and can understand every language. It's so effective that wizards can all speak to animals.
In Gregory Frost's novel Shadowbridge, the world is filled with incredibly long bridges, divided into spans. Each span has its own language, but visitors will magically find themselves fluent in it a few minutes after entering.
The Yuuzhan Vong from the Starwars Expanded Universe had a Translator Worm as part of their biotechnology. The tyzowyrms, small worms who could be inserted in the ear to understand foreign languages. Somehow, it also allows them to speak unaccented Basic.
Heavily subverted in the Sector General series by James White. Translator packs are Walkman-sized devices that must be body-worn (typically on a lanyard around whatever anatomical landmark corresponds to the neck), only work for known languages, and can't translate vocal inflections, nonverbal communication, context cues or (amusingly) foul language. Basically, they're dumb terminals running the hospital mainframe's translation program, which isn't a whole lot better than a modern Web translator - and when the mainframe crashes, as in the Etlan "police action" (read: minor war) of Star Surgeon, chaos results.
Subverted in Discworld novels. Terry Pratchett provides examples of many different languages which are all used fairly briefly, including lampooning the fact that the word "Aargh!" can mean wildly different things in different languages. Rincewind the wizard is presented as an expert in languages (In fact, it's probably one of the only thing he's legitimately good at, aside from running and survival), and is the only one who can understand the tourist Twoflower in The Colour of Magic - although not because he speaks his language, but because they both speak a third one. This ability is revisited in Interesting Times. During the majority of the books, though, everyone speaks English (or, as it is referred to, "Morporkian"), which we learn in Jingo is a sort of lingua franca for the entire Discworld, similar to English in our world (at least for now).
- Interestingly enough, in both TCOM and IT, Terry stops providing us with the minutiae of the translation struggle at about the halfway mark, probably because it would drive the reader nuts.
John DeChancie's Castle Perilous is wrapped in a translator spell to serve its numerous interdimensional "guests".
The Shakugan no Shana novels mention an Unrestricted Spell that performs this task; presumably, everyone is just using that all the time.
Subverted in the Left Behind series. Though the Antagonist is the Anti-Christ and has the power of mass-hypnosis, he still speaks nearly every major language and will give speeches in all of them. Consecutively.

Live Action TV

Farscape is the Trope Namer, using Translator Microbes which are capable of translating seemingly everything except the cusswords.
- In several episodes, this is used as a plot point, as D'argo at one point starts a program in his ship that speaks in an archaic form of his own language. He can't understand it, and has to have the computer research the language and inject him with new microbes just so he can make out a few words.
Star Trek uses a Universal Translator. Amazingly, it works even if the Federation has never seen nor encountered the aliens or their language before (apparently, by analyzing its grammar and vocabulary).
- It was subverted in one Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode, where a new species comes to the station and their language is so different, that the universal translator has to spend about half of the episode to figure it out.
- Another DS9 episode had the Ferengi characters crash-landed in Earth's past and due to an unfortunately timed malfunction unable to speak English for a brief period. Of course their mouths still made English words, obviously.
- Likewise, Star Trek Enterprise had several instances where their more primitive universal translators needed some time and calibration (sometimes by a professional linguist) to figure out a new language.
- Also subverted in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Darmok", where despite translating the individual words, the resulting speech was still incomprehensible. The language was too steeped in cultural metaphors.
- These examples suggest that, even if not everyone in the Trek Verse speaks English, most speak something similar to Earth languages.
- An episode of Star Trek Voyager hung a lampshade on the convention, by having a cryogenically frozen guy who could only speak Japanese marvel at how he can now understand the English-speakers.
- Another episode of Star Trek Voyager featured an alien whose language was so out-there (bordering on Black Speech) that the universal translator couldn't handle it, forcing Harry Kim to work on the problem for the better part of the episode.
Doctor Who states that the TARDIS is psychic and provides translations directly into its passengers' minds.
- This bit of Lampshade Hanging was actually woven into the story in "The Christmas Invasion", where the TARDIS universal translator suffered a Phlebotinum Breakdown due to the Doctor being unconscious. The protagonists had to resort to a "mundane" translator to understand the Sycorax, and the moment they suddenly started speaking English, Rose realized that the Doctor had recovered.
- Subverted in "The Impossible Planet", where the language is so incredibly old that it's untranslatable.
- A plot point in "The Masque of Mandragora" when companion Sarah Jane is revealed to be Brain Washed when she questions why she understands medieval Italian.
- This is explored in "The Fires of Pompeii". When the Doctor tells his companion about the Translator Microbes effect, his companion wonders what happens when they speak what they think is Latin. It's implicitly translated back into English.
Stargate SG-1 uses Daniel Jackson, an expert linguist. The movie upon which the series is based hinges entirely on Jackson's lingusitic skills, both to interpret the "operating manual" of the Stargate and to communicate with the people on the other side. However, as the series progresses, his expertise is used primarily to access Imported Alien Phlebotinum, as the inhabitants of at least three galaxies appear to have mastered the language of the "Tau'ri" independently (see Aliens Speaking English).

Video Games

In The Longest Journey, April listens to somebody speaking Alltongue for a few minutes, and her brain appears to learn to "translate" the language, so she hears the speaker as if they were talking in plain English.
Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic makes a passing reference to "autotranslators", but no further explanation is given. Possibly it has to do with the player's Personal Electronic Thing.
All the aliens in Super Robot Wars Original Generations use translation devices, though they are pointedly not perfect. When one guy tells the alien his name (which means 'Mysterious Gourment' in German) one of the alien commanders incredulously asks if his translator is broken. Also, in a fourth-wall breaking moment, another guy begins his normal battlespeech, which segues into an episode splash-screen. After this, the same alien commander just has to ask "... 'Chapter 30'? What the hell?"
The video game Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters is semi-famous for its amusing subversion of this trope, which also makes the race rather scary upon further viewing: the ship's computer is unable to fully translate the language of the Orz, leaving the player to puzzle out bizarre, vaguely Engrish-sounding sentences such as
"Hello to our *house*. Do you feel *better* yet?
If you are *campers* you will enjoy *the change*, but maybe not yet.
It is best if many happy Orz are coming to your *house*."
Averted in Descent: Freespace, where an alien race speaks in incomprehensible grunts overlapped by a speech synthetizer's monotone that is roughly half a second behind. In a game heavy with verisimilitude this turns out to work better than almost any kind of alien-spoken English would. Particularly since the obligatory Returning Destroyers (the Shivans) are the one inscrutable mystery race in scifi games to stay inscrutable, and never speak at all.
- In Freespace 2, the NTF rebellion turned out to be a cover for the revival of a top-secret project to create a Shivan communications translator. Although the GTVA managed to obtain the technology just before the ship containing the prototype was destroyed, we never get to know what happened to the technology or the rogue Admiral who went on-board the Shivan transport. With the game's publisher bankrupt, and the space-sim genre practically dead, we never will know.
- Parodied in the Freespace 2 joke campaign Deus Ex Machina. As an NTF pilot, you are able to witness the top-secret ETAK translator device in action for the first time. Unfortunately, the translator outputs everything in L337-sp34k. It turns out the Shivans thought Terrans and Vasudans communicated via "h07 Pl4s|\/|4" (hot plasma). Apparently when the Shivans first appeared, they witnessed the Terran-Vasudan war, and they thought Terrans and Vasudans firing hot balls of plasma at each other was the two species communicating - which explains (sort of) why the Shivans appeared to be hostile even if they "C4|\/|3 1|\| p34C3" (came in peace) all along. Neither the device's operator nor Alpha 1 are able to decipher the translated l337 text, and if the player failed to plot an escape path, the Shivans will resort to using the "known way of communication".
Subverted in Albion. The player character spends some time taught the locals' language while recovering from a shuttle crash by his more lucky and longer conscious companion.
In Little Big Adventure II, you eventually pick up a translator device that allows you to understand the aliens.
Mass Effect offers up two explanations. The first is that there is speak a galactic trade language, in order to make politics and commerce easier. It sounds like English, but that's purely Translation Convention, as at the end a Prothean hologram is played, only the player (who got exposed to two Prothean beacons) can understand it. We hear as perfect English, albeit with static, but your party acts like it's incomprehensible gibberish.
- The second explanation plays this trope straight. Most will speak the galactic trade language, but there are those who can't or simply choose not to. For them, there is this trope, detailed in the downloadable content and in the second book. Translation synthesizers translate most foreign languages into whatever language the user programs it to. It uses the extranet to pull in any new dialects, and can be in almost any form, from jewelery to PDAs. In the book it is shown to malfuction at times, as it was never built to translate multiple languages all at the same time, and if a an alien is injured and/or insane, the translator has trouble translator the garbled speech.
In Tales Of Eternia (aka Tales of Destiny 2 in the US), Meredy and the Celestians speak the Melnics language, which can be understood by the Inferians only by wearing "Orz Earrings"; these use some sort of psychic Technobabble to send the actual desired words into the recipient's brain, and require the users to be on similar "psychic wavelengths". Interestingly, Meredy (or the psychic equivalent of her voice) speaks in pidgin English for the entire game; whereas when the Inferians actually reach Celestia, all the other Celestians speak with no accent at all, and the requirement of being on the same "wavelength" is, ironically, waived. None of this is ever explained.
Semi-averted in the half-life games. While the friendly aliens speak English, the Vortigaunts speak a very formal, ritualized form of English, and although the G-Man speaks perfect dialectical English, the rhythms tend to be subtly... wrong.
In Star Ocean, advanced species have universal Translator devices (that when necessary can double as EXPLOSIVES). They understand the people who aren't yet inducted to the Pangalactic Federation/Terran Alliance because they've documented and recorded them behind the scenes (read: from orbit). As such, they can speak to anyone (there are no unknown groups in the galaxy) except the Aldians, who are already space-capable and wholesomely unfriendly until their entire species is blown up in Star Ocean III.

Web Comics

In Traci Spencer's Compass, the dimension hopping employees of TDC are given translator implants. See these pages.
In El Goonish Shive the Uryuoms (but not the chimerae, according to the Word Of God) have the ability to instantly learn any language by rubbing the knobs of their antennae against the head of someone who speaks it, or teach a language which they know to others in the same fashion.
Consciously averted in Fans!, where a group of aliens communicate by a form of visualized telepathy; only artists with exceptional visual imagination are able to communicate (and mate) with them.
Inverted in Mega Tokyo where Largo's new translator translates Japanese into bad "Engrish". It didn't help that he used a spam mailbox to 'improve' the translation.
The titular planet in Earthsong provides a psychic translator microbe field which allows anyone on the planet to understand anyone else, speaking or writing. Writing remains in the original langiage however, and once noone's left who understands the language concerned, it reverts to incomprehensibility until it can be laboriously deciphered.
Killroy and Tina has Universpeak, an "empathic language" that allows communication with all lifeforms, even aliens and animals, when aided by a Neural Enhancer.

Western Animation

In Teen Titans, Starfire could learn a language by kissing a native speaker. Robin is, needless to say, depressed to hear that their random first kiss meant nothing. (This editor has never been able to verify whether this is a Tamaranian racial ability or a talent unique to Starfire.)
- In the comics, at least, it's a racial ability. And any skin contact will do; Starfire kissed Robin because that's the fun way. In the "X-Men/Teen Titans" crossover comicbook, she learns Russian in a similar way smooching Colossus. Much to Kitty Pryde's chagrin. Nightcrawler immediately asks if she'd like to learn German.
Spoofed in Futurama: Professor Farnsworth's Universal Translator can only translate into an "incomprehensible dead language" (French).
In every version of Transformers, the Transformers, living millions of light years away from Earth, don't just speak English the moment they get here - they speak it on Cybertron too. And it's particuarly noticable in Transformers G1, where they do a lot of travelling between planets that for some reason always speak English.
- See also Translation Convention, DUH.