Had an interesting discussion on Facebook today that I thought worth sharing. Participants will be referred to only by first initial, lest they not wish to be named.
I kicked it off by writing: “In many sci-fi movies, among them District 9 and Return of the Jedi, a human speaks to an alien in English, while the alien speaks alien-talk, yet both totally understand each other. In real life, with different human languages, when does this EVER HAPPEN?”
and thereafter, followed:
S: babelfish.
W: Family dinners on my mother’s side of the family. My uncles speak to their kids in German… my cousins speak back in English.
LYT: Nope, like the Star Trek universal translator, [babelfish] doesn’t count…as a translator is sourced within the narrative. Biggest offender is the Jabba/Leia-in-disguise/3P0 scene in Jedi…interpreter Threepio translates both alien languages into English, even though neither participant in the conversation ostensibly speaks it.
LYT: W – fascinating. Do they understand each other?
P: I have seen people do this, but in the Scifi world I always just figured alien tounges and soft palates were too different to speak huminoid dialects, but ears are ears.
W: Yeah, they totally understand each other. It’s just that the one is more comfortable speaking one language, and the other… the other. I kinda get it. My aunt speaks in English, too. She’s tired of German. So she’ll carry on a conversation with other Germans entirely in English… which they all understand but prefer not to speak. This is actually… See More common in a lot of immigrant families. I’ve had friends from Korean, Chinese and Armenian households where the exact same thing goes on. Oddly enough, I’ve never seen this happen in a Spanish-speaking household.
M: My previous ex-girlfriends did the same thing with their parents/grandparents and was indeed fascinating. I could still follow the conversation by listening to their responses. I also remember seeing it done in the movie Crazy/Beautiful – It’s quite enjoyable when it’s done. Makes the future seem much more interconnected, diverse and seemless.. nice.
J: In Miami, everyone assumes you speak Spanish. While I do, it annoys me when people assume I do and start talking to me in Spanish. So I respond in English. It pisses them off because they know I understand but I refuse to indulge them. It’s wonderful. It also happens in my family. People talk to me in Spanish but I’ll always respond in English unless they only speak Spanish.
G: I like Paul’s sci-fi explanation, it’s one I can get behind.
W: Actually, come to think of it… I do this myself when I’m in France. I’m the only one of my cousins that does not speak German, so I can’t participate in that game, but I do speak French. And I find it incredibly annoying when I’m in Paris that I walk into a store, speak to them in French… and they speak back in English as if saying, “I need to practice my English and I know you’re American so I’m just going to speak to you in English…” And being stubborn, I reply again in French. So it’s precisely that scenario – but it gets kind of tense because neither of us is willing to yield and start speaking in our native language in order to appease the other. That’s happened in Cannes, too. I hate it. So yes, I’ve lived this very thing as well. But not in a good way.
