Universal translator

A universal translator is a device common to many science fiction works, especially on television. First described in Murray Leinster's 1945 novella "First Contact", the translator's purpose is to offer an instant translation of any language. As a convention, it is used to remove the problem of translating between alien languages when it is not vital to the plot. Especially in science fiction television, translating a new language in every episode when a new species is encountered would consume time normally allotted for plot development and would potentially become repetitive to the point of annoyance. Occasionally, intelligent alien races are portrayed as being able to extrapolate the rules of English from little speech and rapidly become fluent in it, making the translator unnecessary. While a universal translator seems unlikely, scientists continue to work towards similar real-world technologies involving small numbers of known languages. As a rule, a universal translator is instantaneous, but if that language has never been recorded, there is sometimes a time delay until the translator can properly work out a translation, as is true of Star Trek. The operation of these translators is often explained as using some form of telepathy by reading the brain patterns of the speaker(s) to determine what they are saying; some writers seek greater plausibility by instead having computer translation that requires collecting a database of the new language, often by listening to radio transmissions. The existence of a universal translator tends to raise questions from a logical perspective, such as: The continued functioning of the translator even when no device is evident; Multiple speakers hear speech in one and only one language (so for example, for a Spanish speaker and a German speaker listening to an Italian speaker the Spanish speaker would only hear Spanish and neither the original Italian nor the translated German, while the German speaker would not hear any Spanish nor Italian but only German); Characters' mouths move in sync with the translated words and not the original language; The ability for the translator to function in real-time even for languages with different word order (such as a phrase the horse standing in front of the barn would end up in Japanese as 納屋の前に立っている馬, lit.