Lost in Translation, Found in the Struggle
Hello, all
Well, I’m back. I’ll tell you honestly, after the election results came in, I very seriously thought about giving up on not only the newsletter, but on writing. Writing about the future felt silly and pointless.
But in my frustration, the thoughts I kept turning to were along the lines of “If only people understood ____” and “if only I could tell everyone _____”. And, although my reach is small, I had to face facts eventually that if I want people to hear things I believe, I have to say those things. And those were things I have already been writing into my books, and my newsletter.
So, I gave myself some time to catch my breath.
And now I’m back, here, with you. I found I missed you all and compiling these little research/brain dumps.
A couple quick housekeeping matters before I jump into this months main subject (universal translators!).
One: While I am hardly rolling in dough, my family is basically comfortable. Because of that, I have decided that, for the foreseeable, ALL of the money I make from any of my books, in any format, will be donated to climate change orgs that I know have a proven track record.
Two: I have an audiobook narrator picked out for Names in Their Blood! While I adore the work Jack Evans did for the audiobook for Secondhand Origin Stories, he’s not available anymore, and so I’ll be working with Kai Stewart, who does Bedtime Stories for Nobody, which I encourage you to check out. The work he’s done so far on Names in Their Blood is fantastic! It’s very emotive, and the funny parts are hilarious. He’s recorded the first scene and you can give it a listen here. It’ll be a few months, but if you’re an audiobook fan, please look forward to it! Kai is also donating all of his income from this audiobook to climate orgs.
Three: I will be ending each newsletter now with some call for action. I’ll be trying to focus on things that are free, so please don’t think I’m about to start sending you fundraising emails. Just small actions you can take- that we can hopefully all take together.
Ok, so that’s the state of me within the state of the world.
Let’s talk about universal translators!
This subject has been backburnered in my brain since I attended a panel at WisCon years ago on the subject. It’s at the forfront of my brain this month because I’m having a delightful time watching people on TicTok jump ship rather than see what happens when an already sketchy app sells it’s soul to Trump. I’m enjoying it because I’m loving the cultural exchange I’m seeing since a lot of them are going to RedBook, A Chinese app. Where everything is in Mandarin.
A language miles away from English. And it would seem that the majority of digitally migrating US TicTok users have no prior experience with communicating in any Chinese language.
But, we’re in 2025, and so, while some enterprising Americans are dedicating themselves to learning Mandarin (which I think is admirable), the majority of people seem to be relying on online translation websites.
And those are as close as we get to a universal translator right now.
It might be almost as close as we ever get.
As we’ve established before, I grew up on Star Trek. That was the foundation of my love of scifi. And, of course, universal translators are a mainstay of that venerable franchise, and the genre as a whole. Even before I spent years waiting for Deep Space 9 to do more with my favorite character, I was always hoping for an episode where the universal translators broke, and they had to prevent the ship from blowing up or whatever while being very impaired in communicating with each other.
I think maybe one of the newer treks has finally done it? I refuse to have every streaming service on the planet, so I’ve lost track.
If you, like I, have only had very cursory and introductory level instructions in a second language, then the problem with universal translators might not be apparent. You learn: this is “library”, but in Spanish. This is “eat”, but in Japanese. This is “bathroom”, but in Russian. We are presented with new grammar, and a bunch of directly translatable words.
If that was actually how language worked, we’d have universal translators by now.
But it isn’t.
I’ve been told- and correct me if I’m wrong- but my understanding is that English in particular is unusually awash in synonyms. Benjamin Franklin reportedly once published a list of over 200 words meaning drunk.
I like that example, so let’s use it. There’s buzzed, which means just starting to feel the effects of alcohol, and tipsy, which means roughly the same but with a cutsey connotation. There’s intoxicated, but that could mean you’re under the influence of alcohol or some other substance. There’s sloshed, which has a connotation of loss of motor coordination. And of course there’s wasted, which is impaired further still. The exact boundaries of these words are debated- especially by those under the influence.
They’re not exact synonyms- they’re close enough that we can have thesauruses, which I am thankful for, but they aren’t exactly the same.
So, while I expect the majority of languages have a word for the effects of ingested alcohol, they’re not all going to have the exact corollaries to the fine differentiation between almost-synonyms.
So, a direct 1 to 1 translation isn’t really possible.
And then we come to difficulties with cultural baggage around a word.
When I was taking Japanese in college we came to a list that translated “like”, “love”, “dislike”, “hate” and “well, it’s a little…”. My professor told us to pick up our pens, and cross off the translated word for “hate”. She said that we wouldn’t be tested on that word because she didn’t want us using it. She said Americans use that word much much more liberally than the translation implied, and we were very likely to cause problems for ourselves and others if we tried to use it as a direct 1 to 1 translation, because the Japanese word carried so much more weight behind it.
Most of the class, myself included, already knew that word from melodramatic anime, but I did remember her admonishments.
Then there are words that simply have no corollary in every language. Once again my closest comparison comes from Japanese. I first heard “ma” translated into negative space, which is an English term from visual arts for the empty shape around a subject. If I draw a filled in circle on a sheet of paper, the white space all around it is “ma”. Ok, I got that. Then I watch a gardening show and a Japanese monk refers to the shape around the stones in a zen garden as ma. But that’s just three dimensions instead of four. Then, I heard a prominent Japanese film-maker refer to moments of comparative stillness in a film as ma, even when the screen was filled with image.
So it’s space…with blankness in 2D or emptiness in 3D or a quality of slowness in linear and narrative time.
We can describe it in English, but there isn’t a single word for it.
So, if we had a universal translator, it would have to make constant footnotes or asides to explain that the word you just heard wasn’t the actual word, and provide context and explanation for imperfect symptoms and implications and cultural charge that may not be agreed on by people in various locations who speak the same language (Chips in Australia vs US vs England) and…
So, not very much like Star Trek at all. Certainly not very smooth and straightforward communication like a regular chat between two people with the same language and cultural background.
Look, my goal here is not to be a party-pooper. I’m not trying to steal universal translators from genre fiction. Sometimes the story is about something else, and so you fudge some worldbuilding to reduce distractions and complications that destroy the story’s pacing.
(Though I do think it’s interesting that scifi that comes out of a very multicultural country that doesn’t take second language instruction seriously unless the second language is English likes to toss aside the barriers of language.)
My point is that this is fun. This is worth playing with. You’d think more authors would revel in the richness and complication of language! I get a big grin on my face every time I see someone leaning in to the possibilities here.
Give me language barriers! Give me hard to translate nuance! Give me characters pushing through these barriers or failing or refusing to! Hell, give me universal translators and show me subtle worldbuilding through the biases in the translation. I want characters who can’t convey something because the automated translator lacks the specific nuance they need.
I want all of it.
And yes, if you know a good examples of this, this is your invitation to tell me about it.
Call to action:
This month, most of us are inundated with national news. But a lot of the best work for the next few years is going to be at the state level. US readers, I am asking you to go to 350.org and check out your local chapter. Sign some petitions for efforts close to home. The climate movement hasn’t stopped, but the approach has changed for now. I know this org, and here locally they’ve got a whole lot done.
Stay safe and stay hopeful, friends.
I’ll see you next month,
Lee Brontide
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop. And don’t forget, as a subscriber to Shed Letters, you have exclusive access to my free novelette, Doll’s Eye View, the Martin focused story that takes place between Secondhand Origin Stories and Names in Their Blood.