C-3PO, Babel Fish and Mind Melds

A while ago, I gave a lecture on aliens in science fiction. One of the topics I covered was the means of communication.  I discussed a number of fictional translation tools with students.  The first example was, of course, C-3PO.
"Hello, I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations."  C-3PO is a protocol droid, and translation is one of its major functions.  From a translator/interpreter's point of view, C-3PO is rather "basic" even though it (or he?) is familiar with over six million forms of communication.  It is a robot in place of a human (or some other intelligent life form) translator/interpreter.  It still lacks skills in recognising human emotions.  For example, in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), when Han Solo was kissing Princess Leia, it walked in untimely.  A human butler would have waited and avoided causing embarrassment.

Interestingly, it does show some human traits, like being fussy...  Is that one of the GPP features? You know, genuine people personalities.

C-3PO is one of my favourite sci-fi robots.  Sometimes, as a translator/interpreter in difficult situations, I just couldn't help but quoting,
"We seem to be made to suffer.  It's our lot in life."
Well, at least I never complained about having to meet people at the airport or hotel and take them to some other place.  "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction, 'cos I don't."  This is not C-3PO.

Smarter Choice?

I took this photo in 2007 when Computex Taipei was "around the corner."

Click the above image to enlarge and read the tagline beneath the AMD logo.
Smarter Choice?
I wondered if that was intentional. Or maybe just one of those unfortunately placed ads?

Context, the Mystery of the Dead Cat

By a strange coincidence, computer-aided translation is CAT.  Although it may serve as a good companion, we often get scratched playing with it.
Scientists love cats. They are especially fond of the dead ones.
Or the half-dead ones, like Schrödinger's cat. They often mistreat cats in their "thought experiments" or stories to demonstrate their points.
There was one such poor cat in an episode from HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" (1998) entitled "Galileo Was Right."
It was May, 1970 in Orocopia Mountains, California.  Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin and their backups Richard Gordon and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt were in a field trip led by Caltech geology professor Lee Silver.  Jack Schmitt was the only geologist among the astronauts.  (He would later walk on the moon in Apollo 17.)

Silver: Let me put it this way, doing field geology is like solving the mystery of the dead cat.  If you bring me a dead cat, all I can tell you is that it's dead, and it was a cat.  But if you hand me a dead cat, and you tell me you found it in the middle of the road... Ha! What killed it?
Scott: A car?
Irwin: A truck?
Gordon: Heat exhaustion?
Silver: Now you're getting it. O.K. You find the dead cat in the kitchen of your favorite restaurant. What killed it?
Scott: The chef?
Silver: What are we talking about here, Jack?
Schmitt: Context.
Scott: Context?
Silver: Context. The difference between a road kill and a meal.

-- transcribed from DVD

Context.  Not only is it important to geologists, scientists in general, or forensic invesgators, but it is also important to translators.  Many words would have different translations in different situations, so we have to know the context.