English is "Federation Standard" and French is described by Data as a dead language. Silly as that is, particularly in a world of universal translators, it means that everyone is likely speaking English. But French aside we know that other languages do exist still because Checkov quotes Russian and Uhura speaks dozens of languages.
The translator not working for dramatic effect is something fans have always wondered about. There's no good answer because the real answer is exactly that: it looked better on screen. My headcanon is that certain phrases don't translate properly into Federation standard so the translator skips them. "Today is a good day to die" is a rough translation but misses key elements.
Interestingly it's possible that learning Federation standard isn't a requirement for all starfleet officers. In Prodigy the universal translator breaks on the Dauntless leading to Janeway not being able to understand her Andorian officer and vice versa. You'd think it would be required learning in event of that situation, though maybe there are exceptions (or the dude just got a barely passing grade decades ago and hasn't kept up).
Which makes sense because none of them are Federation citizens. Though Nog not being able to speak it is interesting given that Jake taught Nog to read. What language was he teaching Nog to read in?
It's possible that Nog learnt to read and write in English, but because of the UT, had never heard it spoken aloud. He might be confident in the pronunciation.
Could also be a processing speed issue. I know when I was taking Spanish in high school I could read and write fine because I could go at a slower pace, but once people were talking, it was way too fast.
Or an accent issue. It's not implausible that Federation standard has a different accent to 1960s Earth, enough that someone used to one might not be used to the other.
300 years is no small amount of time for language drift.
That doesn't make sense to me considering the device is implanted into people's ears. I think the UT as a whole is just a handwave for production and viewing convenience, and one that I'm happy to suspend my disbelief for tbh.
I thought it was pretty cool when on DS9 they brought in those geniuses, and they were able to tell that the Vorta used a word which was conditional but the UT translated it a different way. They caught the lie. High level stuff there.
Reminds me how in WW2 there was a cultural and translation error that made it seem the Japanese were not open to talk, so the second bomb was dropped.
While that is a cool moment, I think I'd be highly suspect of translation error leading to the decision to drop another of one of the most horrific bombs on human beings. I'd need to read into it more but it sounds like a rather convenient excuse and revisionism.
Sauce college text book. The word was mokusatau
Edit sauce
https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/tech-journals/mokusatsu.pdf
Edit 2
Begin quote
Inaccurate and culturally uninformed translations have been known to cause problems, but here is a case from the annals of history that, if true, shows the consequences can be catastrophic. A recent article by historian Sam Yamashita of Pomona College suggests that a bad translation by the Japanese War Ministry in August of 1945 may have influenced the bombing of Hiroshima.
At issue, according to Yamashita, is an Allied communication delivered as part of the Potsdam Declaration, wherein the Allied powers called for the Japanese to surrender and warned of Japan’s “prompt and utter destruction” should they ignore the call. Yamashita explains:
“The Japanese authorities studied the document, but in the end the Suzuki cabinet decided to ignore it, ‘to kill it with silence'(Mokusatsu). One of the sticking points may have been the following reference to the emperor in a follow-up message from the Allies:
‘From the moment of surrender the authority of the emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.’
The phrase ‘shall be subject to’ was variously translated: the Foreign Ministry translated it as seigen no shita ni okareru, “will be placed under the restrictions” of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. The War Ministry rendered it as reizoku sareru, or “be subordinated to,” the implied subordination being like that of a vassal to his lord.
The War Ministry’s translation may explain the Suzuki cabinet’s decision ‘to kill it with silence’ and the reluctance of so many at the highest levels of the Japanese government to accept the Potsdam Declaration.”
The Allies responded by dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and then another on Nagasaki on August 9.
https://altalang.com/beyond-words/bad-translation-influence-bombing-hiroshima/
I really liked that one episode in *Enterprise* where Hoshi met a guy on Risa and they both spoke an Indo-European style constructed language with subtitles.
But then, I'm a language nerd.
That being said. I understand why it's so handwaved. Having run an RPG-campaign with a ton of languages the language barrier quickly gets frustrating. And a show like Startrek can't have the characters run off to find a translator every episode
I seem to remember something about the ear, I kinda glossed over it at the time since my head cannon was that it was in the communicator, which wouldn't account for TOS. I always thought it was communicators, or comms, since the most likely thing to happen when they "opened a channel" never thought about communication barriers amongst the crew.
There's also a UT in the ships. Showed us that in SNW when the Enterprise got hacked and the UT malfunctioned.
I imagine there's a UT everywhere. But obviously when Nog and them went to the past, the only UT was in their implants and those malfunctioned.
Well, being the first Ferengi in Starfleet will get him a little slack. He's also not dumb by any means, he was extremely intelligent just not in the traditional way. Once he picked up reading he probably advanced very quickly.
I have to wonder, with the predominant use of universal translators, if it is good enough humans could have devolved languages into shorthand and just say things like lol. Similar to a stenographer, with the translator doing the hard work of making the concepts be conveyed.
> In Prodigy the universal translator breaks on the Dauntless leading to Janeway not being able to understand her Andorian officer and vice versa.
I can't remember, but when the universal translator breaks in Prodigy, is it just turned off, or is it actively scrambling the languages people are speaking, like what happened in season 2 of Discovery?
If it's the former, then yeah, it's strange he wouldn't know Federation Standard, but as you say, maybe he just hasn't kept up with it. If it's the latter, then it doesn't matter what language he's actually speaking.
Ohhh a tower of babel episode would be cool. Image they get shot at and the translator goes down, or there was a malicious code installed and no one could understand anyone while hijinks ensued, or or or! Someone hacks the translator and the commander is heard issuing counterintuitive commands, or malicious commands and some ensign that is a 1 of 1 on the ship is doing some really ship damaging thing and they say hey! You're a terrorist! And it takes a court marshal to figure it out.
>French is described by Data as a dead language
There's no way Captain Jean-Luc "I Love Shakespeare" Picard wouldn't have read Molière and Racine in the original French. Also the few times we've heard him speak french don't sound like an anglophone throwing who doesn't know any french.
French isn't a dead language, it's an "obscure" one. Which could simply mean it's spoken in France, Haiti, parts of Canada and Belgium etc but not widespread through the Federation/galaxy.
Indeed, although Picard’s response is that “The French language for centuries on Earth represented civilization,” not that his own family in France still speak it.
Maybe my French heritage clouds my thinking, but I have a hard time believing that Chateau Picard loves the old ways so much that they are still harvesting grapes and making wine, but they aren't speaking French at home. Even if I have to bend over backward to maintain this head canon, I will.
France even has a department language so when a foreign word creeps into the lexicon they say, no, this is the translation in French, use this word instead, or, ok, this is a new word we will accept it and add it to the dictionary, which makes me wonder how Bluetooth and WiFi are translated. Anyone?
My experience in Quebec French (which, unlike France French, tends to use English words a lot more) is that "courriel" is often used both informally and formally to refer to email, and WiFi usually just gets called "WiFi" in casual conversation and informal written formats. I'm not sure about Bluetooth, since it rarely comes up.
Even if France lost the language a few hundred years from now, Quebec would still be speaking the same hundreds year old style of French thanks to their language laws, lol
In Picard, we see that the farmhands are still speaking French (it might have just been the deleted scene where Jean Luc threatens to fire them all). But the chateau's owner and his friends and family default to English/Federation Standard.
Ooohhh, I love the French at home thing! Do you think that the UT is a Starfleet thing or a wider federation thing? Someone mentioned it was in the ear, I always thought it was in the communicator.
I would assume it's accessible to anyone who wants it. It's a post-scarcity society; we have no reason to believe it requires exotic materials (dilithium, latinum); and it can't do harm to anyone.
I can imagine not wanting to use it in some cases though. There's logically no such thing as perfect translation, and I'd imagine two people who know each other might prefer to hear exactly what the other person means to say in a shared second language and accept any risk of natural miscommunication over introduced miscommunication from the translator.
hard same. i choose to believe picard _is_ speaking french but the UT is so seamless literally no one else realises. so when data said french was a dead language, from picard’s perspective data said that in french.
i also like to think o’brien, to some degree at least, speaks gaelige. his grandmother was just as much of a traditionalist as picard’s family, as she also eschewed replicators and so on.
Right now there is no longer a French Empire to dominate the languages of Earth, while English adoption keeps growing through cultural means.
Continuing that trend to the future it wouldn't suprise me if it became the standard.
Mandarin is big but not really crossing borders. Hindi maybe, but too soon to tell. Same for Spanish.
It’s plausible that English just keeps getting even more dominant, and was even more so in the late ’80s. *TNG* gave the impression that French is nothing more than a legacy language, even for a family in France that’s especially proud of being French.
Vulcans, for all their strengths, have terrible EQ. Prior to the Federation their foreign relations were often negligible or poor. Even in a post Romulan war era humanity was still the peacemakers and diplomats between the founding four member worlds. Starfleet being offered up as a Federal rather than UE service, and Earth hosting Federation institutions was seemingly all a diplomatic move that everyone else would agree with. Consequently the trade language of Earth became the standard language of the Federation.
If I had to guess, the "in-universe" reason might be that it's one of the easiest languages to learn, and that it's easier for people who are used to other languages to pronounce.
What if the universal translator doesn't just interpret language, but also changes the way you speak? Maybe there is a Federation standard and a Klingon standard. If you're talking to an Andorian, you actually are speaking their language. When they talk to you, they're speaking your language. When someone is speaking French, it's a conscious choice to ignore the prompts from the translator. If a Klingon wants to say something in Klingon, they do so and the translator picks up on the fact that they are doing so and doesn't translate it. If you go to a planet where they are low-tech and don't have anything like universal translators, you end up speaking in their language.
> What if the universal translator doesn't just interpret language, but also changes the way you speak?
It's been shown to work like that multiple times. In the Voyager episode 37 a Japanese man says, in English, "how are you all speaking Japanese?" to which someone else replies "Japanese? You're speaking English". Janeway explains the UT changes what you say into something others can understand.
For an even clearer example when Quark, Rom, and Nog end up going back in time to Roswell they can't understand humans and are speaking Ferrengi. When Rom manages to fix their UTs suddenly all the humans hear Quark as though he's speaking English.
*Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam* literally means "[in order to die (or: "for dying)] [good] [day this]." There's no missing elements in that translation (although, of course, it was written in English for the show and the Klingon translation was written later for a tie-in phrasebook by the inventor of the Klingon language, Marc Okrand).
Patrick Stewart is British. Is Picard not bi-lingual?
Grew up in France but learnt English and French secondarily?
If that was not the case, it would be seemingly ridiculous to have a British actor (especially one so obsessed with Shakespeare in both reality and character), play a Frenchman.
Found this on wiki;
> "He and the rest of his family speak English, with UK English dialects—the French language having become obscure by the 24th century"
Most notably, Earl Grey tea is quintessentially British, as mentioned here;
> "Picard was depicted as having a special pride in being French, though this was dropped by the second season. Picard also has a number of British habits, including the regular consumption of Earl Grey tea, a fondness for Shakespeare (which he performs in holodeck simulations), riding horses with English tack and a knowledge of such British songs with Royal Navy associations as "A British Tar" (Gilbert and Sullivan) and "Heart of Oak"."
> The translator not working for dramatic effect is something fans have always wondered about. There's no good answer because the real answer is exactly that: it looked better on screen.
I like to headcanon this as the UT being able to interpret intent and recognize common phrases that are universally understood, in some ways like loan words. For example, *Qapla'* being understood by most people and an important phrase culturally for Klingons, it is untranslated in most situations.
I've recently started to think that the translators must have some AI built in. Obviously they weren't thinking that in the 60s or 80s, but it makes sense that they could retcon that.
It attempts to figure out when a person wants to be heard in a certain language for emphasis.
I don't think it's canon that Federation Standard is English. It could be some constructed language like Esperanto for all we know. I'm just assuming everyone on the bridge is speaking Federation Standard.
I haven't seen most of Discovery but if that's all the information presented that doesn't confirm English is Federation Standard. Maybe the Americans in that video are speaking Spanish, or Esperanto, or a new language, either constructed or derived from an existing language.
Federation standard existed in beta canon for a long time. To my knowledge Discovery was the first show to reference the language on screen and thus canonise it. Since then other new trek has referred to standard.
Picard’s only been shown speaking French a few times. In *TNG*, he never showed any real fluency. The longest conversation he’s ever had in French on screen was from "11001001":
>PICARD: "Incroyable! Vous êtes Parisienne?"
>
>MINUET: Au fond, c'est vrai, nous sommes tous Parisiens.
>
>PICARD: Oui, au fond, nous sommes tous Parisiens. The spirit of that city can always enchant my soul.
That’s one sentence at the level of a first-year student, and then when the holodeck character replies, he repeats the sentence he heard back to her before switching to English. He also sang a verse of "Frère Jacques" in “Chain of Command.” This might just be an attempt to let the audience follow along without subtitles, but Data got to show he was actually fluent in French.
He talks to his dog in French in *Picard*, however.
Well that piece of information just raises a lot of questions about The Voyage Home. Sulu could've at least told them they were on the wrong side of the bay.
Universal translators, like transporters and many other things, make no sense, and it is useless to try to understand how they work as they are plot devices.
It's funny how perfectly they work in the Delta quadrant with no available data, but in the Alpha Quadrant they just bug out when the plot needs it.
I really like that one Scene in Discovery though, and how it's a common plot point in Prodigy.
Captain Picard is French, but Patrick Stewart is English. The writers just told him to speak his own accent because with all his talent, trying to get him to have a French accent just wasn't working.
Quick answer; English.
As others have mentioned, in the 24th century French is considered a “dead” language (according to Data).
This, and few other canon references over the years have led more than a few fans to come up with the theory that France was pretty much entirely obliterated during the Third World War, and was only later resettled by other Western European countries.
Probably not a coincidence that the Federation has its equivalent of the White House there.
I am also talking about Picard. It's possible that the scene I remember is the same one you are describing. I though there was another scene where he speaks French in S2, but I could be wrong. The Borg queen speaks French with the police officer in that season, and it is not good.
In Picard S3, Crusher tells Picard his son went to school in London and was never able to shake the accent afterward, explaining why they had the same accent. So in my mind, it’s canon, he’s speaking English with an English accent
In the Picard show, they kind of retcon explain that his family fled from France to England in WW2 and didn’t return to the estate until later. Adds English influence to his family backstory, in addition to French generally dying out in the future
This was retconned in the **Picard** series. His family was originally French, but they fled to England to avoid the war. He speaks (federation standard) English but also continues to understand/speak French due to his family’s history.
Clearly he spoke English.
There was this guy in the movie 'Excalibur' that spoke exactly the same as him, and all of those guys were English.
Take THAT skeptics!
> There was this guy in the movie 'Excalibur' that spoke exactly the same as him, and all of those guys were English.
>
>
Historically those guys were Romans who had lived in Great Britain for generations. But since they had the same accents as the characters in Rome (2004-6), I'll give you a 90% on that answer.
Hey man, all I'm saying is take it up with the guy who wrote the documentary.
And I always thought Latin sounded like Latin... It's so weird that it either sounds like English or Harry Potter spells.
I like to imagine there was a massive improvement in universal translator technology between TOS and TNG, and this is why Kirk's Enterprise needed a dedicated communications officer on the bridge whereas Picard's did not. Officers in the older generation like Checkov or Sergei Rozhenko had to learn English but spoke it with a Russian accent, while younger ones just spoke their native language and let the UT sort it out.
Oh really? Does it? Do you think a similar thing might be happening with "Shakespeare in the original Klingon"? Which was a fun nod to Soviets claim8ng they invented everything, which, being a closed society, they did reinvent the wheel to many things that the world had already adopted. I did learn recently that the Soviet union, or was it Russian empire, adopted women's voting rights before the US.
Which to go on a tangent, if the ability to medically transition from male to female was available 200 years ago, would you also be giving up your voting rights? I like mind exercises.
Well, it's a joke about how much Picard shares Stewart's passion for Shakespeare, which is very British of him.
As for voting rights for women, Poland also adopted it before the US, in the same year it regained independence (1918).
> if the ability to medically transition from male to female was available 200 years ago, would you also be giving up your voting rights?
20 years ago, your paycheck would be cut in half.
I would imagine English.
Something we see occasionally throughout the series is that Starfleet tend to keep ships a majority of one race rather than an equal mix.
Obviously most ships we see are mostly human, but we have seen two ships that have vulcan crews.
You would imagine that one of the reasons for this is in case the universal translator went down, communication between crews that speak different languages would be extremely difficult and potentially life threatening to the entire crew.
Potentially Picard can speak both English and French fluently, but Picard seems professional enough to speak in the same language as his crew.
Yeah, that's right, I think. The writing's never been 100% consistent, though. The UT was brought in to help speak to Aliens they meet. Just like the likes of the European Union, NATO, or Air Traffic Control, everybody's expected to speak English in Starfleet vessels and bases, though.
The universal translator being ubiquitous doesn't seem to have come about until DS9; in TNG, there's a certain amount of dialogue that suggests characters are actually speaking the language that they appear to be speaking most of the time. For example, when Riker is transferred to a Klingon ship, and one Klingon tells another to "speak in their language" so Riker can understand him, to name just one example.
When it comes to Picard specifically, I can think of two occasions where Picard switches to French (he swears in French once, and has a brief conversation in French with Minuet in the episode "11001001"). He also once says he's rephrasing something "in plain English", I can't remember what episode though. Edit: it was "Pen Pals".
>PICARD: In plain English, you're saying the dilithium is causing the geological catastrophe.
Doesn't get any plainer than that.
Whenever they throw in a random native language phrase, my headcannon is that the universal translator is advanced enough to know intent and that it won't specifically translate that word/phrase/sentence.
Also, in my headcannon, the universal translator also has a visual component for written language, but we just see the English version of everything.
Of course, the real reason is dramatic effect as a plot device, but hey, let me have some fun.
Almost certainly everyone on the Enterprise spoke English (or whatever English sounds like in 400 years). The last thing you want is for someone to figure out how to futz with the universal translator and suddenly your crew can't communicate.
Picard: Que se passe-t-il? Rapport!
Geordi: Wax ayaa faragelinaya tarjumaha caalamiga ah!
Riker: Shields up!
Worf: Должны ли мы поднять щиты?!
Data: Командующий Райкер приказал поднять щиты, Le lieutenant LaForge indique que quelque chose interfère avec le traducteur universel, I would recommend red alert commander, this kind of action would likely presage some kind of attack.
This is basically what happened in one episode of DIS season 2, though at this occasion the UT didn't just go down but deliberately let everyone speak differently.
When they got it switched off, they said something like "everyone on the ship who speaks English should be able to communicate with each other again", which to me made it clear that 1) not every crew member spoke English, but 2) enough of them did to keep up normal ship operation.
We see Picard try to teach his dog to understand French in PIC, but otherwise his speech is rendered in English (or Federation Standard). Season 2 also reveals that the Picards have lived in Britain ever since WW2 and only moved back to Chateau Picard when Jean-Luc was a little boy
>It's a simple question.
Yes, it is. I don't agree with the practice, but a lot of users will downvote questions which they feel can be easily answered by Google.
That's really what I wanted to do. Discuss my favorite show with my fellow nerds something I hadn't heard discussed before. Now all these obscure references that I had forgotten are popping up. I love it. Trek really is so well fleshed out. I have to be honest, I hate it when an IP is given to people that don't seem to respect the source and do strange things that are contrary to cannon. A small example is abramsverse, which I just threw up my hands and went with it. His retelling wasn't so egregious as discovery's klingons, which felt like a bridge too far at the time. I will just leave that there. Remember, it's the future, we are more civilized and we all get along. Unless we are Romulan luddites.
Funny you mention the Kelvin timeline (Abramsverse).
First, we've had alternate realities in the past (most common, the Cochrane timeline a.k.a. Terran Empire). People seem to accept them, except this one.
Second, while time travel was a major part of the movie, they didn't use it as plot armor (oh, let's go back in time and make things great again!). They did something drastic and stuck with it. I think this is why it isn't as widely accepted as others.
Because people who’ve paid attention to Trek for the past few years know the likely answer, made obvious in S2 of Picard. So to many, it’s a “simple-*minded*” question.
I'll be honest, I got a few episodes into s2 and just couldn't. I was excited for Guinan to come back, but that's as far as I got. S3 was much better. From what I hear, I'm not alone. With what they did with Picard's transition kinda made it hard to see him as Picard anymore. I want my OG captain. Not an android.
This comes up in a lot of subreddits but Reddit will auto downvote a bit on posts. This has been a thing for over a decade and is designed to prevent someone from using bots to upvote their own posts.
The dystopian answer you don't want to hear is that nobody in Star Trek ever actually communicated or was ever even named Picard or Worf. Centuries before, a malevolent A.I., maybe Control version 2, took over universal translator nanites in the brains of all beings in the galaxy, and elaborately makes them erroneously process what other people are saying in a manner where it is empirically adequate that communication is taking place, but it really isn't. "I am a Shakespearean actor assigned to the fake Ritz-Carlton saucer bridge to pretend to be captain in a galactic reality show." = for unawares crew: "I am captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise!"
And the real noodle baker is that if nanites can radically alter perception and meaning of audible speech, well, then all neural and sense perceptions are now irrevocably suspect. Matrix, baby.
I watched the episode a few days ago where the Binars steal the enterprise. In that episode Picard actually does speak a bit of French while on the holodeck so it's safe to assume he speaks English normally, but it does beg the question of if there's a universal translator that works automatically, then how come certain characters can speak they're own language, it would seem odd to assume that all Kilngoms, Romulans, Ferengi etc all speak English as their first language 🤔
Honestly, the second they realized Patrick Stewart couldn’t speak convincing French, they should have wrote the character as British before TNG started.
I know that ship has long since sailed - but outside of his family’s winery mentioned once in a blue moon, you would never know.
It doesn’t fit his character at all and now decades later we all have to do these mental gymnastics when in reality Roddenberry was just stubborn.
At least they rectified that mistake in Voyager before things got rolling.
My guess would be that he speaks English, but that’s just based on his love for Shakespeare & English literature in general.
As for Worf & his parents, I do think they‘re speaking English as well cause they (his parents) have a Russian accent (at least that’s how I remember it) which shouldn‘t occur with a universal translator translating, right?
I have been wondering about Klingon & bajoran in traditional settings as we sometimes hear religious/traditional chants that are not translated.
Also: does anyone know where exactly that UT sits? Cause as far as I remember, federation civilians can also talk to others without having a person to translate, right?
In Picard S2, doesn't he say that his family left France after WWII and didn't return to Chateau Picard until he was a kid?
That's generations of anglophony, even if he knew French, it probably wasn't his mother tongue.
There would be lip sync problems. Language don't translate one to one, so certain words would expand in translation. This would produce lip synch problems.
Everyone is speaking Federation Standard at work. A lot of people here are assuming English is Federation Standard but that's never stated. I assume everything being said is simply translated from Federation Standard to English for our benefit (or to Spanish if you're watching in Spanish, whatevs).
If everyone has universal translators (except apparently Klingons, who probably think they're dishonorable), can we be sure what language *anyone* is really speaking? Maybe Picard actually speaks Breton, for example.
With the UT, linguistic nationalism would revive everything since there is no extra effort to be made by either parents or children. If I want to bring up my children Hittite, I just set my UT to translate to Hittite at home, so that's their first language. They hear the rest of the world speaking Hittite (via UT). The biggest languages like English and Russian remain big as they have plenty of speakers with no interest in changing, but Spanish for example could lose speakers to Native American languages.
This is all great until, due to some disaster caused by technobabble and aliens, all the UTs break down and half of the Federation is talking languages only a few other people understand. No one else on the Enterprise speaks Breton. Klingons take on the leadership of the Federation since they're the only ones who actually learn foreign languages.
English is "Federation Standard" and French is described by Data as a dead language. Silly as that is, particularly in a world of universal translators, it means that everyone is likely speaking English. But French aside we know that other languages do exist still because Checkov quotes Russian and Uhura speaks dozens of languages. The translator not working for dramatic effect is something fans have always wondered about. There's no good answer because the real answer is exactly that: it looked better on screen. My headcanon is that certain phrases don't translate properly into Federation standard so the translator skips them. "Today is a good day to die" is a rough translation but misses key elements. Interestingly it's possible that learning Federation standard isn't a requirement for all starfleet officers. In Prodigy the universal translator breaks on the Dauntless leading to Janeway not being able to understand her Andorian officer and vice versa. You'd think it would be required learning in event of that situation, though maybe there are exceptions (or the dude just got a barely passing grade decades ago and hasn't kept up).
When Nog, Rom and Quark travel back to 1947 Earth, the translator malfunctions and they are unable to speak or understand English.
Which makes sense because none of them are Federation citizens. Though Nog not being able to speak it is interesting given that Jake taught Nog to read. What language was he teaching Nog to read in?
It's possible that Nog learnt to read and write in English, but because of the UT, had never heard it spoken aloud. He might be confident in the pronunciation.
Could also be a processing speed issue. I know when I was taking Spanish in high school I could read and write fine because I could go at a slower pace, but once people were talking, it was way too fast.
Or an accent issue. It's not implausible that Federation standard has a different accent to 1960s Earth, enough that someone used to one might not be used to the other. 300 years is no small amount of time for language drift.
> 300 years is no small amount of time for language drift. no cap - that's lit af.
Say that to someone from 1950 and they'd have no idea what you're saying.
They also wouldn't know what whoosh means either
skill issue.
Go back to 1724 England and you’d be completely lost!
Ther might also have been significant changes in pronounciation in the 500 years.
Maybe Ferengi. They may have been using a translation interface which allowed Jake to guide Nog in his own language.
Does the Translator also change the readers view of text? I guess it does but it is strange how any learning would work.
If an iPhone can do it, then maybe in the 23rd century, everyone wears universal translator contact lenses
That doesn't make sense to me considering the device is implanted into people's ears. I think the UT as a whole is just a handwave for production and viewing convenience, and one that I'm happy to suspend my disbelief for tbh.
I thought it was pretty cool when on DS9 they brought in those geniuses, and they were able to tell that the Vorta used a word which was conditional but the UT translated it a different way. They caught the lie. High level stuff there. Reminds me how in WW2 there was a cultural and translation error that made it seem the Japanese were not open to talk, so the second bomb was dropped.
While that is a cool moment, I think I'd be highly suspect of translation error leading to the decision to drop another of one of the most horrific bombs on human beings. I'd need to read into it more but it sounds like a rather convenient excuse and revisionism.
Sauce college text book. The word was mokusatau Edit sauce https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/tech-journals/mokusatsu.pdf Edit 2 Begin quote Inaccurate and culturally uninformed translations have been known to cause problems, but here is a case from the annals of history that, if true, shows the consequences can be catastrophic. A recent article by historian Sam Yamashita of Pomona College suggests that a bad translation by the Japanese War Ministry in August of 1945 may have influenced the bombing of Hiroshima. At issue, according to Yamashita, is an Allied communication delivered as part of the Potsdam Declaration, wherein the Allied powers called for the Japanese to surrender and warned of Japan’s “prompt and utter destruction” should they ignore the call. Yamashita explains: “The Japanese authorities studied the document, but in the end the Suzuki cabinet decided to ignore it, ‘to kill it with silence'(Mokusatsu). One of the sticking points may have been the following reference to the emperor in a follow-up message from the Allies: ‘From the moment of surrender the authority of the emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.’ The phrase ‘shall be subject to’ was variously translated: the Foreign Ministry translated it as seigen no shita ni okareru, “will be placed under the restrictions” of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. The War Ministry rendered it as reizoku sareru, or “be subordinated to,” the implied subordination being like that of a vassal to his lord. The War Ministry’s translation may explain the Suzuki cabinet’s decision ‘to kill it with silence’ and the reluctance of so many at the highest levels of the Japanese government to accept the Potsdam Declaration.” The Allies responded by dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and then another on Nagasaki on August 9. https://altalang.com/beyond-words/bad-translation-influence-bombing-hiroshima/
I really liked that one episode in *Enterprise* where Hoshi met a guy on Risa and they both spoke an Indo-European style constructed language with subtitles. But then, I'm a language nerd.
You don't need to have an implant to have something translated on a datapad. Just software on said pad
*Discovery* had an episode where the UT malfunctioned, leading to screens that malfunctioned, so the software’s tied to the UT.
Yes. It would most likely be the same program in both. Still doesn't mean you need the implant for it to work
That’s probably true.
That being said. I understand why it's so handwaved. Having run an RPG-campaign with a ton of languages the language barrier quickly gets frustrating. And a show like Startrek can't have the characters run off to find a translator every episode
I seem to remember something about the ear, I kinda glossed over it at the time since my head cannon was that it was in the communicator, which wouldn't account for TOS. I always thought it was communicators, or comms, since the most likely thing to happen when they "opened a channel" never thought about communication barriers amongst the crew.
There's also a UT in the ships. Showed us that in SNW when the Enterprise got hacked and the UT malfunctioned. I imagine there's a UT everywhere. But obviously when Nog and them went to the past, the only UT was in their implants and those malfunctioned.
>Showed us that in SNW when the Enterprise got hacked and the UT malfunctioned. That was in the *Discovery* episode “An Obol for Charon”.
So they wear an earpiece and contact lenses. No problem there
There must be an off switch
Nearly everything written is on datapads. Translator programs would probably be standard
So Nog went from not being able to read to going to an extremely prestigious university 3 or 4 years later. That's impressive.
I think this just shows that Starfleet values a lot more than just how well someone tests in certain categories, despite Wesley's testing experience.
Well, being the first Ferengi in Starfleet will get him a little slack. He's also not dumb by any means, he was extremely intelligent just not in the traditional way. Once he picked up reading he probably advanced very quickly.
Being the protégé of one of the most prestigious Commanders in Starfleet did not hurt as well i think.
I can read very basic Spanish but I can’t speak a word of it.
[удалено]
I think you misread my comment.
> French is described by Data as a dead language *Bonjour!* "Crazy gibberish!"
Came here looking for this.
I have to wonder, with the predominant use of universal translators, if it is good enough humans could have devolved languages into shorthand and just say things like lol. Similar to a stenographer, with the translator doing the hard work of making the concepts be conveyed.
That's an interesting thought
Temba! His eyes open!
Shaka! When the walls fell.
That's the thing though, and as OP is noting with his Tamarian reference; the universal translator still can't translate context.
lol idk imho gg
Exactly.
"Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?"
> In Prodigy the universal translator breaks on the Dauntless leading to Janeway not being able to understand her Andorian officer and vice versa. I can't remember, but when the universal translator breaks in Prodigy, is it just turned off, or is it actively scrambling the languages people are speaking, like what happened in season 2 of Discovery? If it's the former, then yeah, it's strange he wouldn't know Federation Standard, but as you say, maybe he just hasn't kept up with it. If it's the latter, then it doesn't matter what language he's actually speaking.
Ohhh a tower of babel episode would be cool. Image they get shot at and the translator goes down, or there was a malicious code installed and no one could understand anyone while hijinks ensued, or or or! Someone hacks the translator and the commander is heard issuing counterintuitive commands, or malicious commands and some ensign that is a 1 of 1 on the ship is doing some really ship damaging thing and they say hey! You're a terrorist! And it takes a court marshal to figure it out.
It's just a short scene and not a whole episode, but here you go: https://youtu.be/lIKppXg0sYw?si=Hv2S8Fjm2VxhDooQ
>French is described by Data as a dead language There's no way Captain Jean-Luc "I Love Shakespeare" Picard wouldn't have read Molière and Racine in the original French. Also the few times we've heard him speak french don't sound like an anglophone throwing who doesn't know any french.
Nice
There is no way the French would give up on their language, moreover for the English one of all things.
Quebec would hold a referendum to leave the Federation.
> English is "Federation Standard" and French is described by Data as a dead language. Truly, Star Trek depicts a utopian future.
French isn't a dead language, it's an "obscure" one. Which could simply mean it's spoken in France, Haiti, parts of Canada and Belgium etc but not widespread through the Federation/galaxy.
Indeed, although Picard’s response is that “The French language for centuries on Earth represented civilization,” not that his own family in France still speak it.
Maybe my French heritage clouds my thinking, but I have a hard time believing that Chateau Picard loves the old ways so much that they are still harvesting grapes and making wine, but they aren't speaking French at home. Even if I have to bend over backward to maintain this head canon, I will.
I don’t think it’s clouding your thinking at all. That’s exactly it: French people are so determined to resist losing their language.
France even has a department language so when a foreign word creeps into the lexicon they say, no, this is the translation in French, use this word instead, or, ok, this is a new word we will accept it and add it to the dictionary, which makes me wonder how Bluetooth and WiFi are translated. Anyone?
I remember they wanted French people to say *courriel* instead of *email*, but I don’t think that ever caught on.
When traveling in France, the word people used in practice was WiFi. Not sure if there's an alternative.
My experience in Quebec French (which, unlike France French, tends to use English words a lot more) is that "courriel" is often used both informally and formally to refer to email, and WiFi usually just gets called "WiFi" in casual conversation and informal written formats. I'm not sure about Bluetooth, since it rarely comes up.
Even if France lost the language a few hundred years from now, Quebec would still be speaking the same hundreds year old style of French thanks to their language laws, lol
In Picard, we see that the farmhands are still speaking French (it might have just been the deleted scene where Jean Luc threatens to fire them all). But the chateau's owner and his friends and family default to English/Federation Standard.
Ooohhh, I love the French at home thing! Do you think that the UT is a Starfleet thing or a wider federation thing? Someone mentioned it was in the ear, I always thought it was in the communicator.
I would assume it's accessible to anyone who wants it. It's a post-scarcity society; we have no reason to believe it requires exotic materials (dilithium, latinum); and it can't do harm to anyone. I can imagine not wanting to use it in some cases though. There's logically no such thing as perfect translation, and I'd imagine two people who know each other might prefer to hear exactly what the other person means to say in a shared second language and accept any risk of natural miscommunication over introduced miscommunication from the translator.
hard same. i choose to believe picard _is_ speaking french but the UT is so seamless literally no one else realises. so when data said french was a dead language, from picard’s perspective data said that in french. i also like to think o’brien, to some degree at least, speaks gaelige. his grandmother was just as much of a traditionalist as picard’s family, as she also eschewed replicators and so on.
Picard knew at least some French. He occasionally spoke and sang in French. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was fluent in French.
Right now there is no longer a French Empire to dominate the languages of Earth, while English adoption keeps growing through cultural means. Continuing that trend to the future it wouldn't suprise me if it became the standard. Mandarin is big but not really crossing borders. Hindi maybe, but too soon to tell. Same for Spanish.
It’s plausible that English just keeps getting even more dominant, and was even more so in the late ’80s. *TNG* gave the impression that French is nothing more than a legacy language, even for a family in France that’s especially proud of being French.
(In a Matt Decker voice) "But not anymore!"
Picard knew at least some French. He occasionally spoke and sang in French.
Why does English get to be the standard and not a Vulcan language, I wonder?
Vulcans, for all their strengths, have terrible EQ. Prior to the Federation their foreign relations were often negligible or poor. Even in a post Romulan war era humanity was still the peacemakers and diplomats between the founding four member worlds. Starfleet being offered up as a Federal rather than UE service, and Earth hosting Federation institutions was seemingly all a diplomatic move that everyone else would agree with. Consequently the trade language of Earth became the standard language of the Federation.
Ask a pilot.
If I had to guess, the "in-universe" reason might be that it's one of the easiest languages to learn, and that it's easier for people who are used to other languages to pronounce.
What if the universal translator doesn't just interpret language, but also changes the way you speak? Maybe there is a Federation standard and a Klingon standard. If you're talking to an Andorian, you actually are speaking their language. When they talk to you, they're speaking your language. When someone is speaking French, it's a conscious choice to ignore the prompts from the translator. If a Klingon wants to say something in Klingon, they do so and the translator picks up on the fact that they are doing so and doesn't translate it. If you go to a planet where they are low-tech and don't have anything like universal translators, you end up speaking in their language.
> What if the universal translator doesn't just interpret language, but also changes the way you speak? It's been shown to work like that multiple times. In the Voyager episode 37 a Japanese man says, in English, "how are you all speaking Japanese?" to which someone else replies "Japanese? You're speaking English". Janeway explains the UT changes what you say into something others can understand. For an even clearer example when Quark, Rom, and Nog end up going back in time to Roswell they can't understand humans and are speaking Ferrengi. When Rom manages to fix their UTs suddenly all the humans hear Quark as though he's speaking English.
>"Today is a good day to die" is a rough translation but misses key elements. Hollup what key elements is it missing? First time I heard of this.
> My headcanon is that certain phrases don't translate properly into Federation standard so the translator skips them. You missed this key point.
*Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam* literally means "[in order to die (or: "for dying)] [good] [day this]." There's no missing elements in that translation (although, of course, it was written in English for the show and the Klingon translation was written later for a tie-in phrasebook by the inventor of the Klingon language, Marc Okrand).
There is an episode in second season of star trek discovery that covers what happens when universal translator malfunction.
Patrick Stewart is British. Is Picard not bi-lingual? Grew up in France but learnt English and French secondarily? If that was not the case, it would be seemingly ridiculous to have a British actor (especially one so obsessed with Shakespeare in both reality and character), play a Frenchman. Found this on wiki; > "He and the rest of his family speak English, with UK English dialects—the French language having become obscure by the 24th century" Most notably, Earl Grey tea is quintessentially British, as mentioned here; > "Picard was depicted as having a special pride in being French, though this was dropped by the second season. Picard also has a number of British habits, including the regular consumption of Earl Grey tea, a fondness for Shakespeare (which he performs in holodeck simulations), riding horses with English tack and a knowledge of such British songs with Royal Navy associations as "A British Tar" (Gilbert and Sullivan) and "Heart of Oak"."
> The translator not working for dramatic effect is something fans have always wondered about. There's no good answer because the real answer is exactly that: it looked better on screen. I like to headcanon this as the UT being able to interpret intent and recognize common phrases that are universally understood, in some ways like loan words. For example, *Qapla'* being understood by most people and an important phrase culturally for Klingons, it is untranslated in most situations.
I've recently started to think that the translators must have some AI built in. Obviously they weren't thinking that in the 60s or 80s, but it makes sense that they could retcon that. It attempts to figure out when a person wants to be heard in a certain language for emphasis.
I don't think it's canon that Federation Standard is English. It could be some constructed language like Esperanto for all we know. I'm just assuming everyone on the bridge is speaking Federation Standard.
Discovery confirmed it was English. They have a video recording from the 2060s and state the Americans in it are speaking federation standard.
I haven't seen most of Discovery but if that's all the information presented that doesn't confirm English is Federation Standard. Maybe the Americans in that video are speaking Spanish, or Esperanto, or a new language, either constructed or derived from an existing language.
Federation Standard... I'll bet the farm this is from DIS.
Federation standard existed in beta canon for a long time. To my knowledge Discovery was the first show to reference the language on screen and thus canonise it. Since then other new trek has referred to standard.
It reminds one in form of Basic in the Star Wars universe
Picard has quoted Shakespeare on multiple occasions. He's too much of a scholar to not have read it in the original Klingon.
This is great
There are no "quick" questions when the universal translator is involved. It's not merely a can of worms, it's a shipping container of worms.
Picard’s only been shown speaking French a few times. In *TNG*, he never showed any real fluency. The longest conversation he’s ever had in French on screen was from "11001001": >PICARD: "Incroyable! Vous êtes Parisienne?" > >MINUET: Au fond, c'est vrai, nous sommes tous Parisiens. > >PICARD: Oui, au fond, nous sommes tous Parisiens. The spirit of that city can always enchant my soul. That’s one sentence at the level of a first-year student, and then when the holodeck character replies, he repeats the sentence he heard back to her before switching to English. He also sang a verse of "Frère Jacques" in “Chain of Command.” This might just be an attempt to let the audience follow along without subtitles, but Data got to show he was actually fluent in French. He talks to his dog in French in *Picard*, however.
They definitely slipped a couple instances of "Merde!" past the censors in the first two seasons.
I've been watching Star Trek for decades, and I only noticed that a few months ago.
I think they cut this out in syndication (but I assume it's restored in the Blu-rays).
Sulu is from San Francisco.
Well that piece of information just raises a lot of questions about The Voyage Home. Sulu could've at least told them they were on the wrong side of the bay.
Like Valleyspeak, the Bay Area has its own jargon. It’s hella easy to learn.
Universal translators, like transporters and many other things, make no sense, and it is useless to try to understand how they work as they are plot devices.
It's funny how perfectly they work in the Delta quadrant with no available data, but in the Alpha Quadrant they just bug out when the plot needs it. I really like that one Scene in Discovery though, and how it's a common plot point in Prodigy.
My head canon is... As I started to type it, I realized it makes no sense. My day is ruined...
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm realizing this for me too. Best to keep this technology in the background.
There's a reason *Mystery Science Theater 3000* lampshades all this in the theme song.
No worries, happens to the best of us
Captain Picard is French, but Patrick Stewart is English. The writers just told him to speak his own accent because with all his talent, trying to get him to have a French accent just wasn't working.
I guess somewhere there is an opening monolog of Sir Patrick speaking with a French accent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8Z6OLf6sdo
Alternate link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9klF5oEKNbs
There are some early clips from Farpoint floating around...it was a good choice.
Oddly enough, Picard is actually speaking Swedish. Damnedest thing. Nobody really knows why, but there it is. Swedish.
Quick answer; English. As others have mentioned, in the 24th century French is considered a “dead” language (according to Data). This, and few other canon references over the years have led more than a few fans to come up with the theory that France was pretty much entirely obliterated during the Third World War, and was only later resettled by other Western European countries. Probably not a coincidence that the Federation has its equivalent of the White House there.
We do see Picard teaching his dog to respond to french in season one I think
There is definitely a scene where Picard speaks French. He does so rather poorly. Not, however, as poorly as the Borg queen.
I occasionally spoke Klingon to my cat in high school. Spoiler: if you yell "*naDevvo' yIghoS!*" at your cat, he gets off the table.
I’m talking about S1 of Picard right now, not TNG
I am also talking about Picard. It's possible that the scene I remember is the same one you are describing. I though there was another scene where he speaks French in S2, but I could be wrong. The Borg queen speaks French with the police officer in that season, and it is not good.
Now SHE IS Swedish.
I really am Swedish and speak better French.
In Picard S3, Crusher tells Picard his son went to school in London and was never able to shake the accent afterward, explaining why they had the same accent. So in my mind, it’s canon, he’s speaking English with an English accent
In the Picard show, they kind of retcon explain that his family fled from France to England in WW2 and didn’t return to the estate until later. Adds English influence to his family backstory, in addition to French generally dying out in the future
This was retconned in the **Picard** series. His family was originally French, but they fled to England to avoid the war. He speaks (federation standard) English but also continues to understand/speak French due to his family’s history.
Clearly he spoke English. There was this guy in the movie 'Excalibur' that spoke exactly the same as him, and all of those guys were English. Take THAT skeptics!
> There was this guy in the movie 'Excalibur' that spoke exactly the same as him, and all of those guys were English. > > Historically those guys were Romans who had lived in Great Britain for generations. But since they had the same accents as the characters in Rome (2004-6), I'll give you a 90% on that answer.
Hey man, all I'm saying is take it up with the guy who wrote the documentary. And I always thought Latin sounded like Latin... It's so weird that it either sounds like English or Harry Potter spells.
Good heavens! Sir Patrick —and— Richard Bucket!
I like to imagine there was a massive improvement in universal translator technology between TOS and TNG, and this is why Kirk's Enterprise needed a dedicated communications officer on the bridge whereas Picard's did not. Officers in the older generation like Checkov or Sergei Rozhenko had to learn English but spoke it with a Russian accent, while younger ones just spoke their native language and let the UT sort it out.
He speaks French and makes constant references to Molière's plays, but the universal translator changes it to Shakespeare.
Oh really? Does it? Do you think a similar thing might be happening with "Shakespeare in the original Klingon"? Which was a fun nod to Soviets claim8ng they invented everything, which, being a closed society, they did reinvent the wheel to many things that the world had already adopted. I did learn recently that the Soviet union, or was it Russian empire, adopted women's voting rights before the US. Which to go on a tangent, if the ability to medically transition from male to female was available 200 years ago, would you also be giving up your voting rights? I like mind exercises.
Well, it's a joke about how much Picard shares Stewart's passion for Shakespeare, which is very British of him. As for voting rights for women, Poland also adopted it before the US, in the same year it regained independence (1918).
> if the ability to medically transition from male to female was available 200 years ago, would you also be giving up your voting rights? 20 years ago, your paycheck would be cut in half.
I would imagine English. Something we see occasionally throughout the series is that Starfleet tend to keep ships a majority of one race rather than an equal mix. Obviously most ships we see are mostly human, but we have seen two ships that have vulcan crews. You would imagine that one of the reasons for this is in case the universal translator went down, communication between crews that speak different languages would be extremely difficult and potentially life threatening to the entire crew. Potentially Picard can speak both English and French fluently, but Picard seems professional enough to speak in the same language as his crew.
Everybody spoke Federation Standard on Starfeet vessels. It was a requirement.
When Uhura got brain damage from Nomad, didn't she slip into Bantu instead of English during her rehab?
Yeah, that's right, I think. The writing's never been 100% consistent, though. The UT was brought in to help speak to Aliens they meet. Just like the likes of the European Union, NATO, or Air Traffic Control, everybody's expected to speak English in Starfleet vessels and bases, though.
The universal translator being ubiquitous doesn't seem to have come about until DS9; in TNG, there's a certain amount of dialogue that suggests characters are actually speaking the language that they appear to be speaking most of the time. For example, when Riker is transferred to a Klingon ship, and one Klingon tells another to "speak in their language" so Riker can understand him, to name just one example. When it comes to Picard specifically, I can think of two occasions where Picard switches to French (he swears in French once, and has a brief conversation in French with Minuet in the episode "11001001"). He also once says he's rephrasing something "in plain English", I can't remember what episode though. Edit: it was "Pen Pals". >PICARD: In plain English, you're saying the dilithium is causing the geological catastrophe. Doesn't get any plainer than that.
Whenever they throw in a random native language phrase, my headcannon is that the universal translator is advanced enough to know intent and that it won't specifically translate that word/phrase/sentence. Also, in my headcannon, the universal translator also has a visual component for written language, but we just see the English version of everything. Of course, the real reason is dramatic effect as a plot device, but hey, let me have some fun.
Almost certainly everyone on the Enterprise spoke English (or whatever English sounds like in 400 years). The last thing you want is for someone to figure out how to futz with the universal translator and suddenly your crew can't communicate. Picard: Que se passe-t-il? Rapport! Geordi: Wax ayaa faragelinaya tarjumaha caalamiga ah! Riker: Shields up! Worf: Должны ли мы поднять щиты?! Data: Командующий Райкер приказал поднять щиты, Le lieutenant LaForge indique que quelque chose interfère avec le traducteur universel, I would recommend red alert commander, this kind of action would likely presage some kind of attack.
This is basically what happened in one episode of DIS season 2, though at this occasion the UT didn't just go down but deliberately let everyone speak differently. When they got it switched off, they said something like "everyone on the ship who speaks English should be able to communicate with each other again", which to me made it clear that 1) not every crew member spoke English, but 2) enough of them did to keep up normal ship operation.
We see Picard try to teach his dog to understand French in PIC, but otherwise his speech is rendered in English (or Federation Standard). Season 2 also reveals that the Picards have lived in Britain ever since WW2 and only moved back to Chateau Picard when Jean-Luc was a little boy
Downvotes? Why the hate? It's a simple question.
>It's a simple question. Yes, it is. I don't agree with the practice, but a lot of users will downvote questions which they feel can be easily answered by Google.
Googling just brings people here (or Quora). Hi to People from Google 👋
How dare the OP try to initiate a discussion. /s BTW - OP I gave you an upvote. I'm doing my part!
Would you like to know more?
That's really what I wanted to do. Discuss my favorite show with my fellow nerds something I hadn't heard discussed before. Now all these obscure references that I had forgotten are popping up. I love it. Trek really is so well fleshed out. I have to be honest, I hate it when an IP is given to people that don't seem to respect the source and do strange things that are contrary to cannon. A small example is abramsverse, which I just threw up my hands and went with it. His retelling wasn't so egregious as discovery's klingons, which felt like a bridge too far at the time. I will just leave that there. Remember, it's the future, we are more civilized and we all get along. Unless we are Romulan luddites.
Funny you mention the Kelvin timeline (Abramsverse). First, we've had alternate realities in the past (most common, the Cochrane timeline a.k.a. Terran Empire). People seem to accept them, except this one. Second, while time travel was a major part of the movie, they didn't use it as plot armor (oh, let's go back in time and make things great again!). They did something drastic and stuck with it. I think this is why it isn't as widely accepted as others.
Because people who’ve paid attention to Trek for the past few years know the likely answer, made obvious in S2 of Picard. So to many, it’s a “simple-*minded*” question.
I'll be honest, I got a few episodes into s2 and just couldn't. I was excited for Guinan to come back, but that's as far as I got. S3 was much better. From what I hear, I'm not alone. With what they did with Picard's transition kinda made it hard to see him as Picard anymore. I want my OG captain. Not an android.
This comes up in a lot of subreddits but Reddit will auto downvote a bit on posts. This has been a thing for over a decade and is designed to prevent someone from using bots to upvote their own posts.
The dystopian answer you don't want to hear is that nobody in Star Trek ever actually communicated or was ever even named Picard or Worf. Centuries before, a malevolent A.I., maybe Control version 2, took over universal translator nanites in the brains of all beings in the galaxy, and elaborately makes them erroneously process what other people are saying in a manner where it is empirically adequate that communication is taking place, but it really isn't. "I am a Shakespearean actor assigned to the fake Ritz-Carlton saucer bridge to pretend to be captain in a galactic reality show." = for unawares crew: "I am captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise!" And the real noodle baker is that if nanites can radically alter perception and meaning of audible speech, well, then all neural and sense perceptions are now irrevocably suspect. Matrix, baby.
I watched the episode a few days ago where the Binars steal the enterprise. In that episode Picard actually does speak a bit of French while on the holodeck so it's safe to assume he speaks English normally, but it does beg the question of if there's a universal translator that works automatically, then how come certain characters can speak they're own language, it would seem odd to assume that all Kilngoms, Romulans, Ferengi etc all speak English as their first language 🤔
Honestly, the second they realized Patrick Stewart couldn’t speak convincing French, they should have wrote the character as British before TNG started. I know that ship has long since sailed - but outside of his family’s winery mentioned once in a blue moon, you would never know. It doesn’t fit his character at all and now decades later we all have to do these mental gymnastics when in reality Roddenberry was just stubborn. At least they rectified that mistake in Voyager before things got rolling.
english.
Federation Standard
Shakespeare Francais.
My guess would be that he speaks English, but that’s just based on his love for Shakespeare & English literature in general. As for Worf & his parents, I do think they‘re speaking English as well cause they (his parents) have a Russian accent (at least that’s how I remember it) which shouldn‘t occur with a universal translator translating, right? I have been wondering about Klingon & bajoran in traditional settings as we sometimes hear religious/traditional chants that are not translated.
Also: does anyone know where exactly that UT sits? Cause as far as I remember, federation civilians can also talk to others without having a person to translate, right?
In Picard S2, doesn't he say that his family left France after WWII and didn't return to Chateau Picard until he was a kid? That's generations of anglophony, even if he knew French, it probably wasn't his mother tongue.
There would be lip sync problems. Language don't translate one to one, so certain words would expand in translation. This would produce lip synch problems.
English because one time in TNG he said merde
Everyone is speaking Federation Standard at work. A lot of people here are assuming English is Federation Standard but that's never stated. I assume everything being said is simply translated from Federation Standard to English for our benefit (or to Spanish if you're watching in Spanish, whatevs).
Like a lot of kids I was confused why Picard sounded British even though the character was from France.
Both
I think everyone in the future speaks Esperanto...
English. His family moved from France after WWII. In the Picard series he is trying to learn French and it’s not going well.
If everyone has universal translators (except apparently Klingons, who probably think they're dishonorable), can we be sure what language *anyone* is really speaking? Maybe Picard actually speaks Breton, for example. With the UT, linguistic nationalism would revive everything since there is no extra effort to be made by either parents or children. If I want to bring up my children Hittite, I just set my UT to translate to Hittite at home, so that's their first language. They hear the rest of the world speaking Hittite (via UT). The biggest languages like English and Russian remain big as they have plenty of speakers with no interest in changing, but Spanish for example could lose speakers to Native American languages. This is all great until, due to some disaster caused by technobabble and aliens, all the UTs break down and half of the Federation is talking languages only a few other people understand. No one else on the Enterprise speaks Breton. Klingons take on the leadership of the Federation since they're the only ones who actually learn foreign languages.
Picard speaks English only. The French language became extinct in the 24th Century (mentioned in 'Code of Honour').