Especially in science fiction television, translating a new language in every episode when a new species is encountered would consume time normally allotted for plot development and would potentially become repetitive to the point of annoyance.
Occasionally, intelligent alien races are portrayed as being able to extrapolate the rules of English from little speech and rapidly become fluent in it, making the translator unnecessary.
While a universal translator seems unlikely, scientists continue to work towards similar real-world technologies involving small numbers of known languages.
The existence of a universal translator tends to raise questions from a logical perspective, such as: Nonetheless, it removes the need for cumbersome and potentially extensive subtitles, and it eliminates the rather unlikely supposition that every other race in the galaxy has gone to the trouble of learning English.
remarking “That kinda makes you proud, doesn’t it?” In William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, along with the other novels in his Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, devices known as "microsofts" are small chips plugged into "wetware" sockets installed behind the user's ear, giving them certain knowledge and/or skills as long as they are plugged in, such as the ability to speak another language.
According to Star Control: Great Battles of the Ur-Quan Conflict, Captain Rand is referred to as saying "That is one ugly sucker" when the image of a VUX first came onto his viewscreen.
However, in Star Control II, Captain Rand is referred to as saying "That is the ugliest freak-face I've ever seen" to his first officer, along with joking that the VUX name stands for Very Ugly Xenoform.
Whichever the remark, it is implied that the VUX's advanced Universal Translator technologies conveyed the exact meaning of Captain Rand's words.
In Star Control III, the K’tang are portrayed as an intellectually inferior species using advanced technology they do not fully understand to intimidate people, perhaps explaining why their translators’ output is littered with misspellings and nonstandard usages of words, like threatening to “crushify” the player.
Deanna Troi mentions the Vulcans have no interest in Earth as it is "too primitive", but the Prime Directive states not to interfere with pre-Warp species.
Improbably, the universal translator has been successfully used to interpret non-biological lifeform communication (in the Original Series episode "Metamorphosis").
The TNG episode "Darmok" also illustrates another instance where the universal translator proves ineffective and unintelligible, because the Tamarian language is too deeply rooted in local metaphor.
A notable exception is in the Star Trek: Discovery episode "An Obol for Charon", where alien interference causes the translator to malfunction and translate crew speech and computer text into multiple languages at random, requiring Commander Saru's fluency in nearly one hundred languages to repair the problem.
In the episode "Arena" the Metrons supply Captain Kirk and the Gorn commander with a Translator-Communicator, allowing conversation between them to be possible.
Actress Nichelle Nichols reportedly protested this scene, as she felt that Uhura, as communications officer during what was effectively a cold war, would be trained in fluent Klingon to aid in such situations.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual says that the universal translator is an "extremely sophisticated computer program" which functions by "analyzing the patterns" of an unknown foreign language, starting from a speech sample of two or more speakers in conversation.
The universal translator is often used in cases of contact with pre-warp societies such as in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Who Watches the Watchers", and its detection could conceivably lead to a violation of the Prime Directive.
No explanation of the mechanics of this function appears to have been provided; the viewer is required to suspend disbelief enough to overcome the apparent limitation.
Roya Soleimani, a spokesperson for Google, said during a 2013 interview demonstrating the translation app on a smartphone, "You can have access to the world's languages right in your pocket...
[6] The United States Army has scrapped the TRANSTAC Program and is developing in conjunction with DARPA, the BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) in its place.