Underclassman (2005)

This new space sci-fi film has earned a fair amount of attention and applause with its comedic charm. With communicating with aliens being a major theme, the film doesn’t sufficiently explore the possibility of languages. A not-so-short period of screen time depicts the detailed progress of how the protagonist, Grace, became able to communicate with the alien, Rocky. Grace cleverly picked the universal language of mathematics as the initial bridge, but it’s an unmoving clock with 12 numbers that finally broke the ice and made the progress—the 12-hour rotation that means nothing on other planets. Subsequently, the advanced translation program that Grace built seemed to operate live interpretation with little or no delay. However, it’s hard not to notice that this advanced machine couldn’t cross the mere limit of English: it can’t put the subject, verb, and object into the correct order, and it can’t directly translate the sentences with the word “question” at the end into a question. It’s an inconsistency that the program can translate sentences in different tenses, yet it can’t do the basic tasks that regular translation apps can do when they translate other human languages into English. While the abstract information was shared by the two parties, it’s an obvious attempt to remind the audience from time to time that Rocky spoke a language distinct from humans.

I can’t help but think about Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which is also adapted into film (Arrival by Denis Villeneuve). In that story, the limit of human language is explored, and it experiments with the concept of determinism. Therefore, the logic of the alien language is fundamentally different there. The magic of linguistic aspects is easy to look past for the hard science fiction works.