Everything Sci-Fi #17 - Universal Translators By Brian Larson eatsleepwrite.net/everythingscifi17 Related Podcast at eatsleepwrite.net/esw125 Language barriers are real. You don’t have to travel very far to realize that English isn’t the only language spoken. Even a visit to your local grocery store will result in coming in contact with a diverse culture. You could run into those who speak Spanish, French, or Russian just to name a few. In science fiction, the problem of the language barrier grows to unlimited boundaries. Planet Earth has nearly seven-thousand recorded languages. The Summer Institute of Linguistics published a report in 2009, that there are 6,909 distinct languages. This number continues to grow as we discover more dialects. Add in the number of languages, if there is life on other worlds, and you get an astronomical number of languages that we would need to decipher. According to Dr. Frank Drake, who came up with the Drake Equation. This is a formula that calculates the number of possible inhabitable star systems that could contain life in our galaxy. In this formula, Drake came up with a figure that the number of star systems could be as many as 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. That is an enormous number of possible languages. The invention of the universal translator is used in many books, movies, and television shows. It became necessary so the story line wouldn’t be clogged with repetitive explanations that would bore the reader. The television series, Star Trek, created by Gene Rodenberry, is probably most famous for introducing the universal translator. In the episode “Metamorphosis,” the alien race called the Metrons supply Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, and the Gorn, a lizard species, a translator. They have to fight to the finish, using only the raw materials from the planet, and the universal translator allows them to communicate with one another between battles. READ THE REST ON eatsleepwrite.net/everythingscifi17 Place a book cover ad, post your stories, chapters & poetry on Eat Sleep Write; broaden your readership. Authors.Sharing.Conversations. EatSleepWrite.net/authorspotlight Twitter: @EatSleepWriting Facebook: https://facebook/EatSleepWrite LinkedIn: linkedin/in/adamscull Google+: goo.gl/FEhGAH
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 13:41:03 +0000
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