That said, given how closely lip movements will appear to match the words for a film which is dubbed very well, it is not inconceivable that a translation done by super-advanced science might be so good as to make the discontinuity between lip movements and voice difficult to notice. Or perhaps they affect vision as well as hearing. Also don't forget that your brain lies to you all the time - you are seeing what you are expecting to see, so when you aren't really concentrating on watching the lips moving, you probably won't notice, especially if the microbes suppressed your visual recognition in that way. Of course, there is a bit of Willing Suspension of Disbelief at work here, since it would be ridiculously hard from a production standpoint to film English-speaking actors and have them move their lips in a fake language, just to dub the same actors' voices in English at the end anyway. This trope not only predates television, it predates most literature. One of the earliest known instances of it can be found in True History by Lucian of Samosata. Written in the 2nd century AD, this story includes adventures in outer space, where everybody speaks Greek (of course). An even earlier example is The Gift of Tongues given to the Apostles at Pentecost in The Acts of the Apostles. After the Holy Spirit comes to them, they address a large crowd drawn from many different nations, and everybody hears them speaking his own language. The members of the crowd are astonished that the people doing this are all Gallileans (normally assumed to be uneducated rustics).Īlmost all Trapped in Another World stories will postulate that Translator Microbes are part of the magical nature of this other world. No justification is required or expected, although it's often good to have some kind of Hand Wave to point out that it's not 'realistic'. Translator Microbes have a tendency to break down when faced with alien cuss words. It is rare for them to state that their transport is overloaded with Anguilliformes. See also Aliens Speaking English and Common Tongue. See also Omniglot, when a character can do this by training or super power.

Cybertronian language translator