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[Quarian Master Race]

What translator? We see every other lip's race move in one language, along with untranslated slang and idioms. They're speaking one language in Mass Effect. Some kind of trade language. They can say what they want in the codex, but they never proved it in any way.

http://masseffect.wi...ng_Down_the_Sky

ME uses the same "universal translator" trope as a lot of other SciFi. No, it doesn't make much sense that some words like bosh'tet or Vega's Spanglish don't get translated, meanwhile idioms do. Nor does it make any sense that it works for a fuckin Yahg when no one knows anything about them or their language. Deal with it or blame Star Trek.

Also, I didn't see any quarians making English lip movements and I didn't pay enough attention to all the other boring crap in the games like non quarian characters.

[Dunmer of Redoran]

http://masseffect.wi...ng_Down_the_Sky

ME uses the same "universal translator" trope as a lot of other SciFi. No, it doesn't make much sense that some words like bosh'tet or Vega's Spanglish don't get translated, meanwhile idioms do. Nor does it make any sense that it works for a fuckin Yahg when no one knows anything about them or their language. Deal with it or blame Star Trek.

Also, I didn't see any quarians making English lip movements and I didn't pay enough attention to all the other boring crap in the games like non quarian characters.

 

I've seen that in the codex before but it has almost no evidence and it's contradicted many, many times in game. I believe that it IS used to some extent, but mostly for Terminus communications and other linguistic conundrums. Quarians might not have lips visibly move, but their lights flash as they speak our languages, same with the Volus and their breathing.

 

In-game, most of the time, communication is through one trade language.

[Quarian Master Race]

no evidence

 

In-game, most of the time, communication is through one trade language.

You broke my irony detector......

But seriously, you think literally every single NPC, like random krogan NPC's on isolated tuchanka, all know a trade language with near perfect fluency?

Their lips make English movements because this is an entertainment product, and everyone's faces being out of sync with the dialouge would be novel for about 5 minutes then terrible for 89 hours.

[Dunmer of Redoran]

You broke my irony detector......

But seriously, you think literally every single NPC, like random krogan NPC's on isolated tuchanka, all know a trade language with near perfect fluency?

Their lips make English movements because this is an entertainment product, and everyone's faces being out of sync with the dialouge would be novel for about 5 minutes then terrible for 89 hours.

 

Of course. How else do you deal with traders? Food sure as heck doesn't grow on its own in a nuclear wasteland (besides varren).

 

When the Council has dominated the galaxy for thousands of years, linguistic rules are going to set in. Look at how many people are fluent English speakers and that's taken how long, 300 years of globalized contact? That's nothing compared to 3000 years of Citadel hegemony.
 

[Quarian Master Race]

Of course. How else do you deal with traders? Food sure as heck doesn't grow on its own.

 

When the Council has dominated the galaxy for thousands of years, linguistic rules are going to set in. Look at how many people are fluent English speakers and that's taken how long, 300 years of globalized contact? That's nothing compared to 3000 years of Citadel hegemony.
 

There's also the issue that the species would not physically be able to make the same sounds due to different vocal structres. The quarians, asari and humans could probably speak each others languages, but the turians, elcor or krogan with no lips? Not a chance, you're more likely to teach a chimpanzee to speak French.  In the Hanar's case, they can't make sounds at all because they communicate via bioluminescence.

You're overstating how widespread English is. In gross numbers, Mandarin Chinese even has more speakers. I can't go to some random North Korean (comparable to Krogan or Batarian pariah states) or Burmese village and expect to find an English speaker, and certainly not have everybody speaking it.

[Dunmer of Redoran]

There's also the issue that the species would not physically be able to make the same sounds due to different vocal structres. The quarians, asari and humans could probably speak each others languages, but the turians, elcor or krogan with no lips? Not a chance, you're more likely to teach a chimpanzee to speak French.  In the Hanar's case, they can't make sounds at all because they communicate via bioluminescence.

You're overstating how widespread English is. In gross numbers, Mandarin Chinese even has more speakers. I can't go to some random North Korean (comparable to Krogan or Batarian pariah states) or Burmese village and expect to find an English speaker, and certainly not have everybody speaking it.

 

The Hanar are the one race it makes sense for. The voice disparities for other races are, of course, rendered within accents. Tali can speak Galactic Standard but she can't say "Chickenpox" without it sounding like "CHEEKENPAWKS?" It's the learning process, I guess.

 

Also, those villages don't have the Extranet. Our world is less globalized than the world of Mass Effect.

[TheN7Penguin]

Bosh'tet might not have an English translation. I know it is similar to bastard, but not the same.

[DaemionMoadrin]

Martin Sheen did a segment on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, narrating a doomsday video... and the entire time I only heard The Illusive Man bragging about how great humanity is.

[Dunmer of Redoran]

Bosh'tet might not have an English translation. I know it is similar to bastard, but not the same.

You can never accurately translate a language artificially. Jokes, figures of speech and inflections don't carry in a machine translation. You need a fluent interpreter or your machines need psychic, mind-reading capabilities (such machines don't exist in Mass Effect).

In game, people are speaking one language.

[nat in the hat]

Ive always wondered this.

Sidonis says the F word in mass effect 2. So was he saying F or was he saying a turian curse that the translation is F?

[DaemionMoadrin]

Ive always wondered this.

Sidonis says the F word in mass effect 2. So was he saying F or was he saying a turian curse that the translation is F?

 

He was saying the trade language equivalent of **** and we got everything in English because that's how the game works.

[NuclearTech76]

 Liara's a different story, since she started off as a naive, idealist who literally supports every single Paragon decision in ME1 but then her writing went of the rails to turn her into a Mob boss. Yet in ME3  we still have her decrying the genophage, supporting the geth, complaining about Falere's murder and crying over/ blaming herself for her own peoples' stupid decisions. 

She had the Shepard dong thrown to her in ME. Apparently Shepard's penis can turn you into a mob boss.

[Marksmad is waving goodbye]

Apparently Shepard's penis can turn you into a mob boss.

I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

[Quarian Master Race]

The Hanar are the one race it makes sense for. The voice disparities for other races are, of course, rendered within accents. Tali can speak Galactic Standard but she can't say "Chickenpox" without it sounding like "CHEEKENPAWKS?" It's the learning process, I guess.

The Hanar are only the most obvious example with their complete lack of physical ability to vocalize (though really they are all the evidence needed outside the Codex that your theory is impossible). Most of the species have such incompatible visible vocal structures (lips, mandibles, teeth, whatever that thing is that the elcor have and somehow can still eat with etc) before even starting to think about other physiological requirments.  They simply would not be able to produce even a fraction of the same sounds even if we assumed that they all had the same vocal chord, lung and diaphragm structure as humans. Forming a sufficient lexicon to produce a language capable of anything more than basic communication with a couple hundred words simply wouldn't be possible. Try saying your alphabet or rereading that paragraph without using your lips and holding your tounge stationary. You can't produce more than a few grunts, certainly not enough to form lexicon or names sufficient for a working vocabulary. An elcor, turian and human all being able to come up with thousands of combinations of the same 3 sounds they can mutually approximate in order to have need for producing a common term for "badassfully" is way less believable than even psychic machine translators.

The chickenpox example is easy, it is a human disease that Khelish borrowed and quarians use the same term for, ergo Tali substitutes the pronounciation she heard from Adams as best she can and the eezo powered brainwave reading VI translator magic or whatever doesn't modify it because *reasons*. You probably cannot pronounce selskokhozyaistvennamashinostroitelniy (yes, this is a real word, meaning the process of building a farm tractor, with no English equivalent that I know of), but your butchery of it would not indicate evidence that you are in the process of learning Russian. The writers needn't explain them in detail, and you'd have a tough time plausibly claiming that Tali in particular is speaking an an admitted "simplified artificial trade tounge" with all the technobabble she spews.
 

You can never accurately translate a language artificially. Jokes, figures of speech and inflections don't carry in a machine translation. You need a fluent interpreter or your machines need psychic, mind-reading capabilities (such machines don't exist in Mass Effect).

In game, people are speaking one language.

You're really going to try and claim absolutes in a universe with as much technological space magic as this? You have no basis in science to make a claim about machine translation technology in Mass Effect except that there is little information and you simply don't understand how it works. If you're going to try and poke holes in the technology, I'd probably start with the patently ridiculous things like telekinesis. Psychic translators would come in somewhere halfway down the list after the god element that breaks all known physical laws of the universe, krogan biology's disagreement with r/K selection, and goddamn spacefairing jellyfish.

Whatever you wish to headcanon is fine for you, but until the writers change it or you can come up with explanations or evidence that deals with the multitude of problems with that claim (namely, every time a species that isn't a quarian, asari or drell is able to speak to a human instead of making unintelligeble "wort wort wort" sounds that we can't reproduce, then looking confused when the human responds in kind), the Codex explanation of "Most individuals know only their mother tongue, and rely on machine translation" will remain most valid and everything else to the contrary is "rule of cool", convinence or bad writing, depending on your opinion.

Tl;Dr it's science fiction. Universal translators are a literary convention that doesn't make much sense, but still makes much more sense than alternatives, and is canon until specifically stated otherwise.
 

[Swan Killer]

Speaking of which, when the Turian calls Tali a suitrat... Do Turians have rats? We know they have no chicken (everything in the galaxy tastes like it...) so how would they know what rats even look like or what they are?

[Turian Master Race]

Speaking of which, when the Turian calls Tali a suitrat... Do Turians have rats? We know they have no chicken (everything in the galaxy tastes like it...) so how would they know what rats even look like or what they are?

filthy humans brought them in ...

[Quarian Master Race]

She had the Shepard dong thrown to her in ME. Apparently Shepard's penis can turn you into a mob boss.

Still happens if you tell her to back off, regardless of gender/sex of the Shepard in question. Even if you threatened to (literally) throw her into a volcano to make the point clear.

Whatever, she's still more believable a character than Shepard being the savior of the galaxy despite an IQ that is sub 80.

[Excella Gionne]

Speaking of which, when the Turian calls Tali a suitrat... Do Turians have rats? We know they have no chicken (everything in the galaxy tastes like it...) so how would they know what rats even look like or what they are?

Question is: How did the galaxy learn English in less than 100 years? 

[Dunmer of Redoran]

Tl;Dr it's science fiction. Universal translators are a literary convention that doesn't make much sense, but still makes much more sense than alternatives, and is canon until specifically stated otherwise.
 

Canon does state otherwise. We find out that there is no physical language barrier with the exception of the Hanar, because that's what makes them unique. If it wasn't unique, then that wouldn't be their distinguishing trait. That's why there's a trade language. It's something every species (other than the non-vocal Hanar) can communicate in. Even if it is a bunch of grunts and clicks. Translator tech can still probably be used in a lot of contexts, but there's nothing in-game that demonstrates it's what most people (besides the Hanar) use.

 

Not once in the lore regarding various languages does it say that other species can't communicate in such a language, with one exception: the Hanar, who I'll cede here. Being perfectly honest, I forgot about them because they're so peripheral to the rest of the story, but there's certain things that translators don't account for, like all Elcor, who announce their emotions before they speak, and the "fly in the lotion" Turian on Noveria. If translators were used consistently, it'd be able to recognize the Elcor and would be able to deal with relatively easy language differences.

 

If translator technologies were being used consistently, we wouldn't have accents, malapropisms, and idioms being spoken through the in-game language. It's also the reason why Javik is able to understand everyone when he touches Shepard. If we were getting translators on everyone, there's no way Javik could understand all of them. But he can, because they're speaking the same language.

 

Long story short, translators are a means to handwave contact between isolated populations, but most people in cosmopolitan space i.e. the Citadel and the Normandy, are communicating to one another directly.

[Swan Killer]

I remember when fanboyz went crazy after hearing the Prothean sounding like Usain Bolt, and it turned out Javik is one of the best character in the trilogy, and the biggest troll existed in 50.000 years.

[Dunmer of Redoran]

I remember when fanboyz went crazy after hearing the Prothean sounding like Usain Bolt, and it turned out Javik is one of the best character in the trilogy, and the biggest troll existed in 50.000 years.

 

I remember when this image leaked:

 

 

and fans were raging because of his appearance.

 

 

Lol. And Bioware gave them something to really complain about.

[Miniditka77]

I remember when fanboyz went crazy after hearing the Prothean sounding like Usain Bolt, and it turned out Javik is one of the best character in the trilogy, and the biggest troll existed in 50.000 years.

 

I always thought Javik sounded a lot more like Mr. Eko, which is why I liked him immediately.

[Quarian Master Race]

Canon does state otherwise. We find out that there is no physical language barrier with the exception of the Hanar, because that's what makes them unique. 

Where? The confirmed existence of a "simplified trade language" for "most species" cannot be used as valid reasoning for your universal premise of "in game, people are speaking one language", especially when it is specficially stated that this is not the case in the majority of circumstances
 

 but there's certain things that translators don't account for, like all Elcor, who announce their emotions before they speak, and the "fly in the lotion" Turian on Noveria.

why don't they? Do you have information on the workings of the translator machines that I am unaware of that describes reasons that they are capable or incapable of such things or reasons they produce responses the way that they do? The burden of proof for your claims here is on you, and you haven't provided it.

 

If translator technologies were being used consistently, we wouldn't have accents, malapropisms, and idioms being spoken through the in-game language. It's also the reason why Javik is able to understand everyone when he touches Shepard. If we were getting translators on everyone, there's no way Javik could understand all of them. But he can, because they're speaking the same language.

Why not? Is there a specific lore reason why translator technology would be incapable of being programmed sufficiently or insuffciently in a manner that allows or doesn't allow such lingual conventions when the ME universe tends not to operate by the same rules that ours does? Javik is a single individual provided with a specific reason for his ablities in Prothean physiology of "reading" physiologies of various species that other species are implied to not posses. That again does nothing to debunk the general claim of "Most individuals know only their mother tongue, and rely on machine translation".

Long story short, translators are a means to handwave contact between isolated populations, but most people in cosmopolitan space i.e. the Citadel and the Normandy, are communicating to one another directly.

None of the evidence you've provided is sufficient to make that claim outside of your own headcanon.

[TheShadyEngineer]

Martin Sheen did a segment on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, narrating a doomsday video... and the entire time I only heard The Illusive Man bragging about how great humanity is.

Heh. Good to know I wasn't the only one.

[NuclearTech76]

Whatever, she's still more believable a character than Shepard being the savior of the galaxy despite an IQ that is sub 80.

In the immortal words of Cardale Jones,

"We ain't come to play no school." 

 

We came to save a galaxy.