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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Consider it a translation convention. There's a time and a place for "cycles" or "rels" or whatever, but it gets into "Calling a Rabbit a 'Smeerp'" [1] territory pretty quickly. The payoff isn't really all that great.

Stargate SG-1 is one of my favorite instances of this. The first couple of episodes address the fact that the Earth characters do not speak the same languages as everyone else in the galaxy. Then, having established the point that A: the show runners understand this is an issue and B: it makes for a rather tedious watch, they moved on to "everyone speaks English" and we all breathed a sigh of relief. I just think of it as part of the "camera" now. It turns out that we don't necessarily want a truly literal recording of what such things would look like.

[1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...

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"The Hunt for Red October" had an interesting way of handling this with the Russian speakers. The movie starts with them speaking Russian with English subtitles, does a slow zoom into the Russian-speaker's lips, and switches to English mid-sentence.

With some elegance, too; iirc they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha" as he reads from the bible, the Latin word for a location near Jerusalem, but having a non-English/non-Russian word be when they switch made it a lot less jarring. Plus, having it be during a read-out-loud-from-book portion allowed for more measured cadence that smoothed the switch but probably would have felt jarring if the audience were parsing multi-character dialogue when it happened.

> they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha"

"Armageddon" actually. Poignant because it's a movie about a nuclear ballistic submarine. But not a particularly non-English word.

ahhh I misremembered — an even better choice!

> "Golgotha", the latin word

Isn't it Hebrew? (for example see John 19,17)

From what I have to hand ..

It appeared in the Latin Vulgate (an early predominately Latin version of the Bible), the Oxford English Dictionary has it as an Aramaic form of the Hebrew "gulgōleþ" (copied from the dictionary) or skull like hill.

I found that incredibly clunky when I saw it. Also, it's a little bit extra jarring that Sean Connery goes from speaking Russian to speaking English with a Scottish accent.

That's just how the Babel Fish works. It translates perfectly, but it tacks on a random accent.

That trick has been used in movies before that too. "Judgment at Nuremberg" does something similar. A character is speaking German, slow zoom, then a switch to English.

We're zooming into their miiiiiind!

I think that these fundamental things can be turned into an interesting topic, but you have to try for it.

Like, in a story background I'm pushing around, there's a coalition of a large amount of species developed on different planets. And you're a military officer, and you need to coordinate shifts, but - assuming some collectively normalized number of hours - some of your tiny dudes are tuned to 3 hours of sleep, 3 hours of leisure and 3 hours of work, others weird dudes with 2 arms and 2 legs are tuned to 38 hour cycles, and some huge dudes with a trunk in their face are tuned to 356 hour cycles.

Even if you could train and adjust this by an hour or two (which, for the 3 hour dudes would compare to an 8 earth-hour extension of duty for us), how the heck would you coordinate any kind of shifts across this? Or does every species have their own schedule? Good look finding crossover meetings then. Some of the small guys would have to do overtime for longer meetings even.

But you have to make it a point of the story and the challenges if you want to include it. If it is just a weird side note, just say that they figured out a conversion and that's it.

Some Star Trek books took the opportunity to work multiple species into the Enterprise's roster, when you don't have special effects problems with doing so.

But some others took the approach that Starfleet has a lot of vessels, and they're still somewhat segregated by species just because of those issues, and while the TV series don't corroborate that very well, I think it's better fanon overall. Peace and harmony among the species is great and all but trying to work 17 hour shifts in 2.5 Gs is going to get really old for the humans. And who wants to wear complicated breathing apparatuses for years at a time?

It would be an interesting direction to take a book series in... why do we see so much about the Klingons and Cardassians and Vulcans on TV? It's not because they're the only important species, it's because they're the species that breath our atmosphere at more-or-less our gravity and solar cycles. The Federation could be a whole bunch of parallel Federations-within-a-Federation where there's an entire set of species who also crew with each other but breath methane, need .7G, and work around 14-hour day/night cycles, and they just don't interact much with each other, not because they hate each other but just because it's so tedious to have prolonged contact.

> The payoff isn't really all that great.

If you’ve read David Weber’s Safehold series, this point gets super clear. It's written with names like "Zherald Ahdymsyn" (Gerald Adamson), but that makes it quite the slog for many.

I could not get through Banks’ “Feersum Endjinn” for this sole reason. English isn't my first language, though I’m fluent in it and read lots of hard sci-fi in it. But half a book using English “spelling rules” applied haphazardly just to make a minor point about one character was well beyond my capacity. I quoted “spelling rules” on purpose because let’s be honest, English doesn’t really have any.

You couldn’t translate that novel to Italian or Finnish, or any language with proper phonetical spelling.

As a native speaker I found it pretty easy to read.

Like in Game of Thrones when Davos was trying to learn to read and incorrectly pronounced the word "knight" the way it was spelled - somehow I could accept that everybody in a fictional universe spoke English except for all the ones who spoke other fictional languages, but I drew the line at words being spelled the same as well.

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