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I’ll admit, it was kind of fun trying to think of anything that someone might find to object to about suddenly understanding every language.
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Gurf asked Picknar, Thoos, Knox, Rodrigo, and Purrloin, “can you understand me now?” Knox said, “oh. You speak english?” Picknar rolled their eyes and said, “the translator chip implants a language chip in the wernicke area of your cerebral cortex. It allows you to understand all galactic languages. You’ll still be speaking your native tongue. But since everyone has these chips in them, we can all converse with one another.” Knox said, “so, every idiot alien I run into knows I can understand them, even if they’re from a different planet?” Picknar said, “exactly.” Knox sat down next to Rodrigo, and Rodrigo said, “that’s too bad, Knox. All those years of not studying a foreign language are now all for naught.” Knox said, “and when we go back to earth, the non-chipped people at the Mexican restaurants still won’t be able to understand my order, but yet I’ll understand them complaining about us.”
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Every cloud’s silver lining is probably tarnished.
Actually, it’s not Silver but aluminized mylar….
I just smile, treat them like anybody else, use my best California Street Spanish, and never raise my voice.
It’s incredible how much they understand when one is polite.
My rusty old high school French was highly acceptable in Paris but rude Americans were not. Funny how people get mixed up on that stuff.
I think it has been touched on before, but the chip would make it almost entirely impossible to learn a new language afterwards. Imagine you don’t know Spanish, you ask someone what the Spanish for “fish” is and they answer “fish”. You repeat it back to them, they say “no, you’re just saying ‘fish’ in English”. You ask them to write it down, it just says “fish”.
Does the chip affect read language or just spoken? I cannot recall strips where there have been much reading ????.
Oops, emojis are turned into multiple question marks! That was supposed to be :thinking: emoji 🙂
It does affect writing as well, unless by a very improbable coincidence, it just so happens that the glyphs for “glsunt’snij igjrli”, which is slumbatharian for “escape pod”, in the xyuikklithian script, looks just like “ESCAPE POD” written in capital Latin letters.
https://www.baldwinpage.com/spacetrawler/2024/07/22/072224-the-punishment/
There are limits to how far you can successfully immerse in an alien culture before it becomes gibberish.
So you mostly should assume you have a chip, unless not having one is funny in some way.
At least you’ll be able to read the menus and point.
“When we go back to Earth”? Assuming a lot there.
I can’t be the only person to notice that Rodrigo seems to have been left out of being chipped. Or did this happen and I just didn’t pay attention?
There are two ZAPs in the panel where he and Knox got tagged together in the previous strip.
As a fluent speaker of three different languages and being able to understand most spoken words of another two, I feel the pain.
I usually default to English since my native Portuguese is not correctly understood most of the time…
Hell, even Brazilians go “oi?” when we speak too fast and we supposedly speak the same language.
I felt that eye roll.
Chris, can you please put a shirt on Knox soon? It’s an unpleasant reminder of those annoying, infomercial men on YouTube. That Skip button cannot appear fast enough for those. ????
I wonder if a chipped person would develop problems with dialects and colloquialisms in their own language. If you have the habit of calling everyone an “asshole,” your chip might take much more benign terms like “ignorant” and translate them to “asshole.”
I think there’s a Law out there–I don’t remember its name–stating “It is possible to overthink any concept to destruction.”
There was a New X-Man in the comics years ago who had multilingualism as an actual superpower. I think they killed him off.
Rincewind in the Terry Pratchett books is supposed to have near-magical ability to learn other languages.