Universal translators make everything possible in the Star Trek series: First Contacts, interspecies relationships, human characters crying to Guinan over their synthale. In fact, they work so seamlessly that the viewer tends not to notice they exist until they encounter the occasional problem, as they do in DS9’s “Sanctuary” or Voyager’s “Nothing Human.”

By comparison, machine translation as we know it in the early 21st century is messy and incomplete. Everyone who’s used Google Translate or seen automatically translated text on social media knows that it’s not yet at Starfleet’s level. Read More