When you visit a foreign country in real life, how do you communicate? Well, if you speak the native language – voila, no problem! Or, vice versa, if your language happens to be a popular foreign language in the country you’re visiting, all the more if it’s the lingua franca of the day (like English is today), you can traverse around the globe relatively freely without any knowledge of foreign languages, counting on the natives speaking your language. If neither is the case, it still might be that both you and the natives will speak the same foreign language that you can communicate in (again, probably English nowadays). If even that fails… well, what can you do? You can rely on someone translating – if it’s an official visit or you are rich, it will likely be a hired professional translator, while if you’re just an anonymous tourist, it is always nice if you have a local friend who speaks your language. If no translator can be found, you can go around with a dictionary, or, today, with a translating app, looking up words and phrases you need. If all else fails, and the need is great, you may just test your pantomime skills. Language is a wondrous and complex subject!
Both fantasy and science fiction have their share of cultural variety, that should come with appropriate linguistic implications. And with planned contact between cultures, all of the above options have their place in these genres. However, a trope is often present in them that rarely corresponds to real-life experience in this day: namely, that of unexpectedly coming into contact with a completely alien culture. Usually, someone crash-lands onto a completely foreign planet (or is at least forced to make an unexpected stop there, minus the crashing), or travels through a portal into a dimension until then unknown to them – in both cases usually making first contact with an alien race or culture. In those cases, it’s highly unlikely even that both parties will speak Galactic Common, let alone have an available translator who knows both of their languages! (Sorry, C-3PO, you’re not always there.) So how do the genres handle this?
It should be fairly easy, right? As Clarke so aptly put it: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Unless you’re writing a low-tech sci-fi or a low-magic fantasy, and you specifically want the language barrier to be a problem, you can just poof it away by snapping your fingers. One sentence is sufficient to inform your readers (viewers, players etc.) that character such-and-such possesses the right magic or technology to blast the language barrier into oblivion.
In science-fiction, we have ample evidence of this. From Leinster’s universal translator, over very similar technology in Star Trek and TARDIS’s telepathic translation field, to the wacky solutions such as the babel fish, we see advanced technology (errr, or a fish which happens to make God a Schrödinger’s cat, but let’s move on from that one) hard at work at making alien races understand each other. Sometimes, the translation technology is focused on as part of the plot, or at least explained to give a deeper flavour of the universe: we remember problems with the universal translator malfunctioning in Star Trek, or the technology struggling with the unusual Orz language in Star Control games. Most of the times, though, the translation technology is merely there in the background, serving the purpose of letting all characters understand each other and moving on with the plot.
Magic should be an equally easy solution, whether a spell is cast to help someone understand all languages, or to miraculously quickly learn a particular foreign one. However, for some reason, fantasy, and particularly portal fiction, more often than not simply fails to address the problem entirely. The travellers – be it Dorothy falling into Oz, Thomas Covenant coming to the Land or Sienna dashing through a portal into Mixia – simply happen to understand everyone in the new world they’ve just arrived to. Naturally, not all: there are positive examples of the contrary (e.g. The Beginning Place, The Homeward Bounders), but for the most part, as exotic as the new landscape can be, everyone just keeps speaking English (or whatever the language of the work is) as if that went without saying. And many fantasy novels of otherwise high quality are as guilty of this as your run-of-the-mill isekai or action RPG.
Of course, I have no statistics to prove that the problem is more prevalent in fantasy than science fiction – and the very idea of making one sounds like an epic quest – but at least the random sample of my experience throughout the years seems to point in that direction. True, there’s a lot of “science fiction” that is really more space fantasy and is far from explaining the technology that it uses, but even in such settings it seems to me that some sort of universal translator is often at least passingly mentioned, while fantasy so very often just skips even mentioning the issue.
I tried coming up with an explanation for this difference, but none that I’ve pondered on seem satisfactory. More fantasy content is targeted at children and younger audiences, and thus less likely to tackle complex issues such as language barriers? Dubious on multiple accounts. Translating technology being easier to explain that translating magic? Hardly. At least to me, the magic seems easy enough to construe. Perhaps the closest I can get behind is that fantasy portals often lead to magical and supernatural lands from an ordinary, magical one, and thus their inhabitants are seen more as powerful mythical beings than just regular folk who just happen to be living in some other world. This links to various legends and fairy tales where gods and spirits address the hero to confer advice or a warning, naturally, in the hero’s own language – for surely speaking any language is within their power. Many cross-world fantasy settings could fall into this category – but then again, many don’t, and the explanation wouldn’t work there. Maybe it’s just as simple as the “universal translator” having become a trope in science fiction, while translation magic still hasn’t in fantasy? But then again – why?
If anyone has any insight on the issue, I will be most thankful, and happy to discuss it further!
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