Translating science fiction as a metaphor of technology and wonder

by Sue Burke

Originally published by Calque Press in 2024.

If and when aliens make first contact, who should answer? Maybe humankind should turn to people like me, translators of science fiction. We’ve already thought through this kind of problem.

Consider a famous example of translation in science fiction: the “Darmok” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. When the crew of the Enterprise encounters a new alien species, Starfleet’s universal translator renders every word that these aliens say into perfect English, such as “Shaka, when the walls fell,” but their utterances still make no sense. Eventually Captain Picard learns that they speak in metaphors, and he averts a deadly space battle.

This story illustrates how translation with aliens might work, but it still gets so much wrong. Let’s begin our exploration of more likely scenarios by reviewing the basics.

Human language as a complex technology

As we humans evolved, we’ve invented many technologies: tools such as sharpened stones, and methods such as cooking food. Language emerged because, as our social structures became larger and more complex, we needed to share increasingly nuanced information. We could do new things and we needed to talk about them — in calculated ways that maintained social relationships.

At one point, we created writing: physical symbols to represent language. Even today, we keep adapting language to new tools and media.

Thousands of languages exist today, and they all start from human anatomy. Generally, we make sounds with our mouths, which have evolved to make complex vocalizations. We listen to those sounds with our ears, which have evolved to perceive those vocalizations. The sounds have formal meanings associated with them. Sign languages also exist, adapted to our hands, bodies, and eyesight.

This seems basic, but focusing on technological aspects of language will help us avoid philosophical distractions when we speculate on interstellar communication.

Language has become an art form — my favorite art form, and I especially enjoy translation because of its complexity. Translators focus on the written word: a technology within a technology. Meaning can be lost in translation — and found.

Never word for word

Since ancient times, translators have been admonished not to translate word for word. If it were possible to simply substitute word for word between two languages, we’d have just one language with two divergent accents. Instead, words and grammar fail to match exactly. Let me share some examples, many from English and Spanish because those are the two languages I know best, but every language holds equal peril.

In English, intoxication can mean drunkenness, but intoxicación in Spanish always means poisoning, a life-or-death difference in a medical emergency.

The English word individualism can refer to a doctrine of self-reliance, but in Spanish individualismo is synonymous with egocentricity and selfishness.

In Latin, the words pater (father) and mater (mother) are the sources for the words patrimonium (patrimony or inheritance) and matrimonium (matrimony or marriage), which suggests that men and women had different social roles in Roman times. Cultural nuance and subtext affect meaning.

Idioms and metaphors require special attention. The American English expression hit a home run might need to be translated into a word like “success” for cultures unfamiliar with baseball. The recently coined English word cromulent might even require a footnote.

The translator of one of my novels into French asked me to clarify whether the name of an imaginary animal, a boxer bird, referred to pugilism or containers: box in English could mean either thing, but French has separate words for each sense.

By my count, the word you in English could be one of sixteen different words in Spanish. This is why a translator or interpreter may need context when asked to translate even a simple word.

A calque is a compound word or phrase translated directly into its parts in another language, like skyscraper in English and rascacielos in Spanish (rasca meaning “scratch” and cielos “skies” or “heavens”). The English name for our galaxy, Milky Way, comes directly from “via lactea” in Latin and refers to an ancient legend involving a breastfeeding goddess whose milk splashed across the sky. It’s always more than mere words.

Language, being an art form, has aesthetics, too. What makes speech or writing beautiful? Again, let me compare English and Spanish.

Fine writing style in Spanish echoes its scholarly roots, dating back to medieval times: formal and elaborated. Above all, beautiful style in Spanish rejects repetition. Vocabulary and syntax should be richly varied.

As modern English was emerging, the King James Bible, published in 1611, became the single major work of literature available to the ordinary person. Its translators had produced unornamented prose meant for ordinary people, not scholars, and they stuck close to the syntax of the original languages, notably Hebrew in the Old Testament. Many of those Bible verses were poetry, and Hebrew poetry does not rhyme; instead, it uses parallel, balanced structures of phrases or ideas, and repetition of words or rhythms. English embraced repetition of words and syntax as a mark of beauty.

One example is from Ruth, 1:16-17: “…whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, I will die…”

I kept that in mind when I translated Prodigios (Prodigies) by Angélica Gorodischer, a novel about a haunted house. Its dense prose is without a doubt beautiful in Spanish. Here’s the Google Translate version of one passage:

“[…]in some houses the curtains were modestly closed lest that excessive sun, far from place and measure, as if tearing apart the parquets and tapestries, would discolor the upholstery and worse, give food for thought by stinging the skin of the forearms and behind the earlobes to the watched and obedient girls who changed, also at that time like the sun[…]”

Here’s my version:

“[…]in some houses the curtains were chastely closed because this sun, excessive, out of place and propriety, might burst on parquet floors and tapestries, might fade the fabric, and worse, might pierce the skin on forearms and behind earlobes of protected and obedient girls, inciting their thoughts, girls who also transformed in that season like the sun[…]”

I offer these examples to try to shed light (notice the metaphor) on how language works. Translation involves using all the resources of a language consciously, but science fiction adds one more requirement: invention.

Science fiction imposes new metaphors

Author Ursula K. Le Guin was also a translator, and her translations include Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer. “I translate a text because I love it, or think I do,” Le Guin said, “and love craves close understanding.”

In a 1971 article in the Australian fanzine Scythrop, Le Guin wrote that science fiction’s reward “is the special complexity and difficulty of invention … less real than the world around us, a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that independence, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revelation. It will be a vision, a more or less powerful or haunting dream. A view in, not out.”

Later, in the 1976 introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, she elaborated:

“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life — science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of the metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.”

Translators of science fiction thus have a special charge: to create a close understanding of a new metaphor, an invention distant from shared experience, or a revelation — and to do so in words. Science fiction goes where no one has gone before.

But there’s more.

In a 1980 essay titled “The Number of the Beast” in his book Breakfast in the Ruins, author Barry N. Malzberg tried to define science fiction. He said it “holds that the encroachment of technological or social change will make the future different and that it will feel different to those within it. In a technologically altered culture, people will regard themselves and their lives in ways that we cannot comprehend.”

Another essential element of science fiction, insisted on by fans since the 1940s, is that these stories should inspire a sense of wonder.

All translation should be true to the source, and translations of science fiction must strive for clarity while preserving invention, new metaphors, encroaching change, and a sense of revelation and wonder: they must not only be understandable but be unable to be misunderstood, a special level of clarity.

Delightful challenges: invented words, languages, and worlds

Invention makes translation especially tricky. Science fiction invents languages and creates strange new worlds — all of them metaphorical — and the translator may need to transform them into new words in a language with different aesthetics and linguistic resources. For me and many translators, nothing could be better creative fun.

The short story “Elemental, querida potestades” (Elemental, Dear Potestates) by Laura S. Maquilón, uses invented gender-inflected pronouns, articles, and adjective forms for characters who embody elemental states: fire, air, earth, water, and ether. English has less flexible grammar, and when I translated it, after some experimenting, I only managed to find new pronouns: “[…]pyr noted the tension in geos arm and smiled inwardly[…]” I’m not wholly satisfied with my translation. I think something was lost. Sometimes that’s inevitable.

The short story “Techt” by Sofia Rhei contains a chart for a new written language called Alphabet 100. One of the hundred symbols is Ð, described in the text of the story as meaning de (of) in Spanish. Could I do something with that sign in English, or would I have to ask for a change in the chart and pass the problem on to the graphic designer? I began searching and eventually found the runic letter thorn, representing the /th/ sound. My English-language translation says that thorn had been combined with an E to represent the word the in the chart.

My problems with the short story “Abrazar el movimiento” (Embracing the Movement) by Cristina Jurado started with the first sentence: No somos tan diferentes, forestera. “We are not so different…” The word forestera is used repeatedly throughout the story, which is about space exploration. It means stranger or outsider, specifically a female, which matters in the context. I needed to preserve that sense.

Searching through a thesaurus, I stumbled upon sojourner, which means “temporary resident from another place.” It’s also the name of a Mars rover that was named after Sojourner Truth, a woman born into slavery in the United States in 1797 who became an iconic traveling abolitionist. I wanted to reinforce the female sense in the first reference, so the opening line in English became: “We are not so different, sister sojourner.”

Other translators have overcome similar problems. In the trilogy The Hunger Games, author Suzanne Collins invented a hybrid bird called mockingjay, a cross between a mockingbird and a jay. The Spanish name for mockingbird is sinsonte, and jay is arrendajo. Spanish translator Pillar Ramírez Tello combined them into sinsajo, a calque of sorts.

The Spanish translator isn’t known who adapted the name Treebeard, a character in Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, as Barból, a combination of barba (beard) and árbol (tree), but that name is now canon among Spanish Tolkien fans.

Sometimes translation gets bypassed. The term robot was introduced into the English language by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It comes from the word robota, meaning “serf labor.” In the play, the robots seeking freedom revolt and exterminate humanity — which robots have done again and again in science fiction, although not yet in real life.

The flexibility and complexity of language makes precise translation possible: language has a natural ability to cope with change. Science fiction’s relentless imagination and novelty has tested this flexibility and prepared us for the next step in language: how can we communicate with a space alien?

Translating first contact: lessons from science fiction

In science fiction, we talk to aliens all the time, but too often it looks effortless. (Multilingual communication in mainstream fiction sometimes looks just as effortless, but as you’ve seen, it’s complicated.)

In the television universe of Star Trek, Starfleet communicators incorporate “universal translators” that let everyone talk to each other naturally — with the notable exception of “Darmok.” In the television series Doctor Who, the TARDIS has a “translation circuit” that generates a telepathic field for the Doctor’s companions, allowing them to speak with ease almost anywhere, whether in ancient Rome or on Skaro, the home planet of the Daleks.

This magical technology exists in these science fictional universes not because it’s possible (it’s never that easy) but because fiction tells stories, and stories sometimes need shortcuts. Among science fiction writers, one technique is called handwaving: an attempt to distract the reader from noticing an implausibility.

In my novel Semiosis, humans, plants, and insect-like creatures talk to each other, and I deliberately eased the language barriers because language was not the point of the story. Instead, the point was that the characters could talk, argue, and share their unique understandings of their world: what they said mattered, not how they said it.

However, language is the point of Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, a 1998 novella that was the basis of the 2016 film Arrival. Chiang explores the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which contends that the structure of a language influences and possibly determines thoughts and decisions. In Chiang’s story, a linguist attempts to communicate with space aliens who have suddenly arrived on Earth, and she learns that the way they write their language reflects their understanding of time and the physical universe.

“They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all,” the story says. Its aliens don’t think in terms of cause and effect because they know what is going to happen: “They act to create the future, to enact chronology.” The linguist learns to think that way, too, which helps her understand troubling events in her life. (The film jumps beyond the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but linguists say it accurately shows how they do their jobs.)

Alien language is unlikely to sound like the words “Klaatu barada nikto” from the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951 version, because those are words a human can pronounce. How likely is an alien vocal tract to resemble ours? On our own planet, porpoises can communicate with other porpoises, and chimpanzees can communicate with other chimpanzees, but our ears and voices can’t hear or reproduce all their sounds. Aliens might not even vocalize. Earth’s oak trees communicate among each other without a sound.

We aren’t sure yet whether life exists on other planets, although astronomers are eagerly looking and listening. The NASA Exoplanet Archive confirmed more than 5,550 planets outside of our solar system at the close of 2023, with thousands more likely candidates, but none with signs of life. Scientists have monitored radio signals for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence since the 1960s.

We assume the aliens will use radio signals. Pulsed lasers might also work. So far, we haven’t detected anything, but if and when it happens, or if aliens drop by in person, we might be prepared.

The SETI Institute, which searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence, has published a curriculum for grade school students. The Rise of Intelligence and Culture is meant to help them think about how to communicate with aliens. The lesson starts with understanding what we are. In the foreword, Carl Sagan, an astronomer best known for the 1980 award-winning television series Cosmos, explains it this way:

“To understand the prospects, you need to understand something about the evolution of stars, the number and distribution of stars, whether other stars have planets, what planetary environments are like and which ones are congenial for life. Also required are an understanding of the chemistry of organic matter — the stuff of life, at least on this world; laboratory simulations of how organic molecules were made in the early history of Earth and on other worlds; and the chemistry of life on Earth and what it can tell us about the origins of life. Include as well the fossil record and the evolutionary process; how humans first evolved; and the events that led to our present technological civilization without which we’d have no chance at all of understanding and little chance of detecting extraterrestrial life. Every time I make such a list, I’m impressed about how many different sciences are relevant to the search for extraterrestrial life.”

Linguistics is one of the sciences, and it tells us that if we detect something resembling communication, it might be very strange. In general, human languages depend on our senses of vision and hearing. Even then, human languages vary on concrete details, such as what colors they recognize and how they conceptualize numbers. We were so baffled by Egyptian hieroglyphics that we needed the Rosetta Stone to translate them.

Space aliens, like some Earth creatures, might communicate by scent, which could affect their intuitive view of something as basic as arithmetic. For them, numbers might represent probability rather than digital absolutes, which is how we think. (“Digit” comes from the Latin word digitus for finger or toe, an early form of human counting and the source for the base-10 number system.)

In the novel Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, intelligent spiders communicate through vibrations and signals with their legs and body parts, as well as by taste. In the sequel, Children of Ruin, octopi communicate with colors.

An alien language from an entity with a distributed or inherited intelligence may need to specify the internal origin of the utterance. A creature that communicates with light may have a grammar that branches like a decision tree along infinite paths, each step specifying a choice not made. Our new alien friends might communicate with pheromones or magnetic fields.

In our eagerness to talk, we assume that aliens will, regardless of their means of communication, find a way to send signals toward us: we believe they will want to talk to us. Transmitting is a harder job than listening, and the aliens would be more advanced than we are — or so we want to believe. If our aliens have superior experience and capabilities, their message should be easily decoded because they would know how to make it comprehensible.

Astrobiologist Douglas A. Vakoch, writing in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica, warns, “Perhaps this assumption really reflects our ethical assumption that if a civilization has the resources to transmit messages for our benefit, it should transmit messages.”

We know our own presence as a technological species can be detected by our electromagnetic radiation — all our television and radio broadcasts, as well as signals we’ve sent into space — and by atmospheric changes since the 19th century due to industrialization. Climate change proves that we’ve been busy. Space aliens ought to know we’re here.

In fact, Vakoch says, we may need to earn the right to receive messages by first transmitting messages of our own. We may even have to pay some sort of dues or obey an established protocol to join a “Galactic Club.” There is also no reason to believe, he adds, that if we intercept a message, it is meant for us rather than a message we’ve eavesdropped on between aliens. The sender also might not have superior technological capabilities.

Above all, we hope we’re not the first civilization in the universe able to communicate beyond our planet: we hope we’re not alone. If we are, sadly, we’ll hear nothing.

We also tend to assume the aliens are biological beings. The UK’s Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, in a BBC news article, suggests otherwise:

“If an evolutionary transition to non-organic intelligence is inevitable across the Universe, our telescopes would be most unlikely to catch human-like intelligence in the sliver of time when it was still embodied in that form. It is perhaps more likely that the aliens would be the remote electronic progeny of other organic creatures that existed long ago.”

These aliens might not want to be detected, he says: “Indeed, their intentions may be impossible to fathom.” They might be content to travel between stars and even galaxies as near-immortals. They might prefer zero gravity because, as machines, they could be large and lightweight and have less need for energy, which could be more easily harvested in space. They might prefer colder regions and could hibernate for billions of years, silent and content.

“They may not have the same base desires as us,” Rees writes. “We have evolved through Darwinian pressures to be an expansionist species. Selection has favoured intelligence but also aggression. But if Darwinian pressures do not apply to these artificial entities, there’s no reason why they should be aggressive.”

If he’s right, we needn’t fear invasion from space robots, but life, whether organic or inorganic, might be either common or rare, noisy or quiet, or so advanced that we wouldn’t recognize their messages at all.

“In sum,” Reese says, “astronomers like me should expect surprises. We ought to be open-minded and make sure that we wouldn’t miss anything odd.”

Suppose we hear something: do we answer?

If we get a message, our first act might be to suffer an existential crisis. We might encounter the limits of our ability to communicate because we could find ourselves wholly unable to decode the message. According to Dominique Lestel, a French cognitive scientist, “Humans may come to understand that there exists in the universe a set of phenomena that they will never be able to know because they are not clever enough.”

If we do understand the message, we might need to suspect deception or malice rather than good will. In any case, who should answer?

In 2010, the International Academy of Astronautics issued Protocols for an ETI Signal Detection: once a signal is confirmed by independent observers, it should be reported to the scientific community, the International Astronomical Union, and the public. It recommends a response made with “guidance and consent of a broadly representative international body, such as the United Nations.”

This sounds logical, but I doubt it will happen on this fraught planet where technological resources rest in many places, sometimes in eccentric hands. No law prohibits anyone and everyone from responding, and human nature abhors a vacuum.

But Vakoch points out that we will face real diplomatic, legal, and ethical concerns. Answering could even be a political act, calling attention to ourselves or making claims when we might not know about alien capabilities and intentions.

Should there even be a single voice answering for Earth, scientists ask, presuming we could agree on one? Would diverse responses, even a cacophony, be more representative of Earth? Would the recipient be any more politically or culturally united than we are? Would their ethics be like ours? How honest should we be? If we can be helpful in any way to extra-terrestrials, should we volunteer our wisdom or aid? How would we manage a relationship that, given the distances involved, might last for centuries or millennia?

Perhaps, instead of worried scientists or agenda-driven politicians or magnates, a team of science fiction authors and editors should step up to handle the crisis. We’ve already thought through a wide variety of answers to these questions: what could go joyfully right and what could go horribly wrong. We have plenty of experienced translators ready to volunteer their skills in the service of humankind.

Seriously, science fiction has already explored and rehearsed this situation. We have the imagination and complex linguistic technology ready to go. Most of all, we have stockpiles of the most necessary resource: a sense of wonder. Humanity would not be alone. This would be a cause for exuberant celebration!

In 1985, Carl Sagan wrote the novel Contact, in which an alien message is received by Earth and causes personal and political upheaval. In the television series Cosmos, he offered a more optimistic message:

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

Millennia ago, we humans created language, a complex technology to allow us to communicate among ourselves. Now we dream of crossing greater barriers because we are human: restless, expansive, emergent, curious, and social. Translation in science fiction allows us to imagine the next step.

We’re eager to talk with the rest of the universe. Whoever we find, wherever they are from, they too will be made of star-stuff, and that should be enough to let us find a way to know each other.

∞

Resources and Further Reading

Gorodischer, Angélica, Prodigies. Small Beer Press, 2015.

Jurado, Cristina, “Embracing the Movement.” Alphaland and Other Tales. Calque Press, 2023.

Le Guin, Ursula K., “The View In.” Scythrop #22, April 1971, pp. 2-3. The Fanac Fan History Project, https://fanac.org/fanzines/Australian_Science_Fiction_Review/

Malzberg, Barry N., Breakfast in the Ruins. Baen Books, 2007.

Mufwene, Salikoko S., “Language could be humankind’s most impressive technological invention.” The Conversation, 15 Sept. 2016. https://theconversation.com/language-could-be-humankinds-most-impressive-technological-invention-58444

Mufwene, Salikoko S., “Language as Technology: Some questions that evolutionary linguistics should address.” In Search of Universal Grammar: From Old Norse to Zoque, edited by Terje Lohndal, John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2013.

NASA Exoplanet Archive, https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/

Protocols for an ETI Signal Detection, https://www.seti.org/protocols-eti-signal-detection-0

Rees, Martin, “If alien life is artificially intelligent, it may be stranger than we can imagine.” BBC Future, 25 Oct. 2023. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231025-if-alien-life-is-artificially-intelligent-it-may-be-stranger-than-we-can-imagine

Rhei, Sofia, Everything is Made of Letters. Aqueduct Press, 2019.

The Rise of Intelligence and Culture. SETI Institute Academy Planet Project. https://www.seti.org/education, Revised 2010.

Vakoch, Douglas A., editor, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication. NASA History Series, 2014.  https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resources/nasa-history-series/archaeology-anthropology-and-interstellar-communication/

Vakoch, Douglas A., “Responsibility, Capability, and Active SETI: Policy, law, ethics, and communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.” Acta Astronautica, vol. 68, no. 3-4, 2011, pp. 512-519. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2010.01.008