Let’s face it! Communication is what has helped us avert wars and end conflicts. Look at this War on Terror that the US and many other countries are fighting right now. How did we manage to catch Insane… I mean Hussein? Once you get passed all the hoopla and misinformation, what it comes down to is communication. Someone told someone else about the WMDs and we went in and raided his panty party.

What about the other terrorists we’ve caught? Do you think we just happened to be strolling by while they were planning their bad bombings and say, “Hey! You’re under arrest!”? Hardly! We had to find them. Then, once they were found, we had to get that information to the brass, so they could communicate it to the troops, so the terrorists could be caught. I’m not saying that we can’t just happen by and catch the bad guys with their pants down, we can… we have. It’s just that, that isn’t the only way to do it.

Now that said, communication is the key, but we have language barriers to deal with. They aren’t horribly hard to deal with, but it does make for some rather interesting messages. Imagine what Secret Witness Arabia would send us. The message is all in Arabic and we have to translate it, right? We have to put it in English that other people can understand. But what do you do when the message you translate doesn’t make sense? I mean how can you make, “the pizza is cold and the cat is in the milk bottle”, make sense? You can’t really, though I suppose you could try to make it make metaphorical sense. Kind of like Picard does in the Next Gen episode, “Darmok”.

I mean does Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra make any sense to any of you? Straight up word for word, not really, right? But if you look for the deeper meaning, perhaps you’ll find one. I don’t envy those that have to translate that kind of stuff, though, they have to weed through the mess of words that make no sense. Must make it very satisfying when you find that one message that didn’t translate well into English, that tells you where a threat to the US is hiding. I can imagine that something like, “rocks make home hidden and stuffy”, might take a while to get a fix on, but it would eventually come, kind of like a logic puzzle does.

So is the translation game all bad? Is it all hard work and no joy? Not really. Though it is difficult to translate the many languages of the world into English, we do eventually get the meaning. We do eventually find the bad guys. Maybe instead of straight up translating the words by meaning, we should begin using a sort of anagram type system though. I mean it would be relatively easy, though time consuming, to create anagram codes for all the languages of the world. Basically having each language have it’s own set of code for what it’s letters mean. The Romance languages would be easiest to that with, because they aren’t that much different than English, but those which use ideograms or a different alphabet altogether would be a bit trickier. It could be interesting to see that idea put into use, though.