Sigh-Fi

Germany literally has over 40 cities or towns with the name "Neustadt". That's German for "new city".

To be fair we named our planet "dirt"

First of all you don't need aliens for this, all you need is different languages and we already have those, we even have something close to universal translators, so much for sci-fi. Any decent universal translator would know that for example Sahara is a name in English and would try to either translate the name to the corresponding name in the target language if it has one or just as a name. It doesn't matter what the origin of the word is, it's a name. Sticking with Sahara as an example, you can translate "Sahara desert" to Arabic and back and you wouldn't get "desert desert". It actually has a name in Arabic that is something like "the greatest desert" and I assume that for most of those places there exist other names.

All of a sudden "Darmok" is a much less stupid episode.

Don't forget The La Brea Tar pits. Naan bread and chai tea.

Naan bread and chai tea 🤦‍♀️

I'd be surprised if aliens don't do the same thing with their place names, tbh.

One of the many reasons why the only universal translator that makes sense is the Babel Fish

What do you call this planet? Earth And what do you call the ground that you dig up? Earth but it is only capital because it is at the beginning of the sentence otherwise it is earth. Do you pronounce Earth and earth differently? No Ok what do you call the big rocks that orbit planets? Moons And let me guess you call your moon, Moon? Some people prefer Lunar Isn't that just moon in a different language? Yes

They also named a city in California "Lake Forest" while having neither a lake nor a forest.

There's a book called my buddy have be a starship that actually deals with this sort of. Translator keeps calling earth "dirt" to an alien that has only one word for dirt. Many jokes about that sort of thing throughout.

I think we need to look at how the universal translator works to answer this. Does it listen to the sounds and guess the meaning from a limited sample of words, does it scan your mind/network for information?

Easy: Don't translate proper names. Translators often don't do that anyway.

The real question is how it can do lip sync.

Where do wookie names come from? What about "Arrgh-rrrrr-wwwww" translates to "Chewbacca"?

What about words that translate to multiple differrent words

Not sure if that's specifically an English issue or if other language work the same way, but I do know that, in French, I would just say "le Sahara" and would only say "le désert du Sahara" if I'm talking to someone who really sucks at geography.

Same for rivers, I would just say "l'Avon" unless I suspect my interlocutor doesn't know it's a river, in which case I would probably simply add "you know, the river in Great Britain"

Chai tea wants to join this discussion

“What do you call that?” “That’s the yarra, mate.” “We shall call it the Yarra River.”

Me, a genius: because they stop talking

What does a map in Arabic display for the Saharah? Maybe start there, by translating the name back to the original, then make a new translation to English that is more faithful to the specificity.

East Timor / Timor-Leste