• Doraemon has a pocket dougu (gadget) called "Hon'yaku-Konnyaku" (translation konjac). This piece of jelly allows one to understand and speak any known language after eating it. The duration is unknown. Doraemon also has a variety of flavors of konjac such as miso.
• The Familiar of Zero: In the anime, Saito can't understand anything anyone is saying just after he is summoned to be Louise's familiar. Bothered by his nonstop babbling, Louise casts a silence spell on him. Instead, it magically translates everything for him.
• Fate Series: Servants, being spirits of mythical heroes summoned in the modern day, are supplied with all the knowledge they need to function in the modern day upon their summoning so that they won't suffer from things like culture shock. Amongst this knowledge is the ability to speak any human language, allowing Servants to communicate with their Masters as well as other Servants no matter the language spoken (most often Japanese, because the Holy Grail War takes place in a Japanese city). In a drama CD taking place during Fate/Zero, the British Waver Velvet finds himself unable to understand the Japanese Taiga Fujimura, because neither of them can speak the other's language. Waver gets around his issue by having his Servant, Rider, act as an interpreter.
• In Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, Chamber, the AI of the main character's mecha, can translate a newly encountered language, but it needs sample to analyze. The more contact it has with the language, the more fluent it becomes.
• Jewelpet Twinkle☆ has the Rare Rare Drops, candies that help Earth people understand Jewel Land's language.
• The Keeper Wants to Build a Zoo in Another World, so He Tames Monsters: Zig-zagged with the magic that transports the protagonist to a Magical Land. He becomes fluent in the new world's spoken language, but not the written form.
• Macross:
  • In Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?, the Zentradi are shown to be talking their own language for about half the movie. Then after capturing our heroes, the Zentradi archivist Exedor turns on a universal translator. Suddenly the Zentradi are speaking English (conveniently translated to Japanese for the Japanese audience's benefit).
  • In Macross Frontier, the V-Type infection is caused by literal translator microbes, that allows the infected party to tap into the Vajra fold communication network/Hive Mind. The downside of this however is that the host's health deteriorates since the bacteria infects the brain, that is unless, they were infected before birth wherein the bacteria will instead live in the stomach/lower intestine with no ill effects to the host whatsoever.
• During a flashback in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation, Yuri is shown casting a spell from the Tome of the Night Sky so that she can be understood by Iris (as Yuri only speaks Ancient Belkan). She shifts back into speaking Belkan while under mind control, implying that it's messing with the spell in some way.
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: The Torumekians and Eftal peoples speak whatever the series has been translated into, whereas the Doroks speak a strange language written in apparently made-up characters. Very few characters are bilingual & rely on the telepathic powers of Psykers like Nausicaa or Chikuku to translate & are at a great loss without them.
• Mentioned in the Bonus Pages in Vol. 23 of Negima! Magister Negi Magi.
  Q. How are all the classmates able to speak the language in the Magical World?
  A. It's thanks to interpretation magic. It's very elemental magic.
• This also happens in Ninja Senshi Tobikage — however, as a bit of a deconstruction, it doesn't happen right away. Joe, Reni, and Mike aren't given theirs until a couple or so episodes later.
• The Star Color Pendants have this function in Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure. They can't translate written text or non-verbal languages. Notably, Lala still managed to learn enough Japanese that after the magic went away, she was still able to tell Hikaru "Thank you."
• This is Mokona's special power in Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-. Since the cast themselves are from 3 different worlds, if they get separated from him, they can't even understand each other.
• World Trigger: In the beginning of the away mission selection process, this is revealed to have been in effect throughout the series, thanks to the trion bodies and, to a lesser extent, the trion horns of Aftokrator trigger users.
• In the non-Asian dubs of Yokai Watch, Robonyan can speak at any language.

• Big Finish Doctor Who: The ultimate test of the TARDIS' telepathic circuits comes in "Survival of the Fittest", which features alien insects that communicate through scent. The TARDIS translates, but the Doctor's German-speaking companion points out that if it worked perfectly, they wouldn't get the residual scents as well. And the Doctor wouldn't have "a stuffy Prussian accent".

• In Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, Amaya is given a gem that fires a beam at her forehead, giving her the command of all languages, including nilaian, the language of Nilaa, AKA Gemworld.
• Astro City: The employees at Honor Guard's call center use translators that enable them to speak to clients worldwide. These become a plot point in "The Menace From Earth". The First Family routinely use these, but because the "translation field" doesn't extend over broadcast, nobody in the Zirr Empire who watches the official news can understand what the humans are saying. This allows the Empire's leaders to falsely claim that the First Family ran away in defeat and accomplished nothing significant.
• In Atavar, the Kalen inject Atavar with a...thing... to realign his language neural centre, allowing him to speak their language.
• The Avengers: During the first clash between the Avengers and Thanos, it's discovered that the Mad Titan's hordes are using a special machine that allows anyone near it to perceive any words in their native tongue. For instance, The Vision sees the alien writing on the ship in English, while Mantis sees it in Vietnamese. Once the Avengers shut off the device, Thanos' lackeys promptly kill one another since they can no longer understand what anyone's saying.
• During the prelude to the Death of Wolverine arc, "Three Months to Die", Madripoor is given airborne nanites that translate languages, even though all the main characters are worldly people who have enough history in Madripoor to justify speaking whatever common language there. This plot device seems to mainly be included to excuse an alien device that motivates the climax of the arc being capable of communicating in English.
• The Doctor Who (Titan) comic Once Upon a Time Lord has a story that explores the edges of how the TARDIS translation works — when Rose tries to tell the Doctor something in Pig Latin to prevent the Terraptils understanding, the TARDIS automatically translates it into plain Terraptil. The Doctor then hits on the idea of using homonyms, which Rose understands perfectly, but which apparently sound completely different in Terraptil. (Other expanded universe works have implied that the Pig Latin probably should have worked, because the TARDIS would have dectected the intent of her words, including her intent that they were in code. The idea that the TARDIS doesn't worry about homonyms even when that's the point adds a new dimension to the annoyed looks the Doctor often gets when he's in Pungeon Master mode.)
• Green Lantern:
  • One of the many functions of power rings. In the graphic novel Green Lantern: Secret Origins and possibly in other comics, Hal curses and swears and the ring goes "unable to translate".
  • Katma Tui ran into a translation problem in the Alan Moore Green Lantern story "In Blackest Night" when attempting to recruit Rot Lop Fan, an alien whose species evolved without sight, into the Green Lantern Corps. Their language had no words pertaining to the concepts of sight, light or color, so her ring's translation feature couldn't interpret even the phrase "Green Lantern" into his language. She ends up loosely translating the Corps' name as the F-Sharp Bell Corps (F♯ is the recruit's favorite pitch), and his chant refers to sounds and tones in place of light and colour.
  • Also, though they're supposedly programmed with every language in the Universe, there are exceptions, such as the Vegan languages (the Guardians have no jurisdiction in that system) and the language of the Indigo Tribe.
• Played with in Hardware (1993) #19. When Earth is finally visited by Icon's people, they use universal translators. During a fight, one of the aliens is hit, and their word balloon says:
  Alien: Scream: exclamation of extreme physical discomfort.
• Horizon (2016): In one scene early on in the story, Zhia is in a hotel room trying to repair the chip in her head. While she's doing this, the TV is on, but the words are all anagrams of what they should be. Once she fixes it and puts in back in her head, though, it changes to perfect English.
• Justice League of America: Former member Manitou Raven, a time-displaced prehistoric shaman, summons spider spirits called a word-weavers which he places in his ear and his wife Dawn's in order to communicate with the Leaguers. For obvious reasons, Dawn makes efforts to learn English on her own.
• In Silver Age Legion of Super-Heroes comics, alien characters either speak a common language called Interlac, or use "telepathic earplugs" to understand each other.
• Lampshaded in the Golden Age MAD story "Gookum!" when Glarf Nerfnick, Martian, upon landing on Earth, begins to speak to reporters who wonder if he speaks English:
  "Ho-hum! As in most science-fiction stories, I have an automatic translator machine that will enable us to converse!"
• Nova: The Nova Corps power set includes universal translation.
• Power Pack: It's implied that the kids' costumes have universal translators built in.
• Starslayer: The headband/eyepatch Torin wears also functions as a mental link to SAM, who acts as a real-time translator for Torin, who arrives only understanding old Celtic.
• Played with in Strikeforce: Morituri. Some Hordians speak a clumsy form of English,^note "You/All are the special ones — you/all killed my first on Earth, and now you/here think/dream to kill me!" while others wear a crustacean-like creature on their heads that translates for them. In the opposite direction, humans have translation machines to speak to Hordians, though they aren't commonplace. A few have also learned to speak and read the Horde language.
• Supergirl:
  • The Supergirl From Krypton (1959): Supergirl's parents own a device able to decipher alien languages. Kara and her mother use it to learn English.
  • The Untold Story of Argo City: During their stay in Kandor, Fred and Edna Danvers wear special translator devices to understand Kryptonese.
  • Supergirl (Wednesday Comics): Supergirl manages to communicate with an alien race when they use a device simply known as "the translator".
  • Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade: When taking a Spanish class, Kara is surprised that artificial translator components haven't rendered multiple languages moot.
  • Last Daughter of Krypton: When Supergirl first arrives on Earth, she can only understand Kryptonian, so only Superman and a girl named Siobhan Smythe whom she meets later can communicate with her. Siobhan can, through magic, become fluent in any language after hearing a few words. She demonstrates with both Kryptonian and birdsong. Later, Supergirl, Black Banshee, and Siobhan's brother are able to understand each other in Black Banshee's mindscape, but not in the real world.
  • Red Daughter of Krypton: Supergirl gets a Red Lantern Ring which is literally a universal translator... although Kara wondered if her ring's translator was broken when the Diasporan leader called her "their newest Champion".
• Superman:
  • Prisoners of Time! (1986 A.D. to CCLIII A.D.): When Jimmy Olsen time-travels to third century Brittany, nobody can understand him because he speaks a language that doesn't exist yet. Fortunately, druid Picturix's magic allows Jimmy to become fluent in ancient Gaulish.
  • The Showdown Between Luthor and Superman: After meeting the inhabitants of a nameless alien world and their forgotten technology, Luthor uses one of their "Lesson Machines", intended for children, to learn their alien language quickly.
  • Legends of the Dead Earth: In Superman: The Man of Steel Annual #5, Kaleb is given a translator ear-plug so that he can communicate with the other rebels.
  • Superman: Birthright: Lex Luthor uses a "Subspace Translator" to understand the Kryptonians he's monitoring in the past. Superman later uses it to tell his parents he got to Earth okay.
  • Super Sons: Damian has "universal translators" that let him and Jon speak with people from another dimension. But they don't translate idioms well and fine details like specific species can be lost in translation.
• Teen Titans: Starfire (and all other Tamaraneans) can learn a language through skin contact; any skin contact will do, but she kisses Robin because that's the fun way. In the X-Men/Teen Titans crossover comic book, she learns Russian in a similar way smooching Colossus. Much to Kitty Pryde's chagrin. Nightcrawler immediately asks if she'd like to learn German.
• Jonni Future from Tom Strong wore a translator helmet that let her talk to various people and aliens in the future.
• In Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem is injected with a literal translator microbe.
• The mnemonic helmets in Valérian let the user become an expert in various skills or languages in a short amount of time. When visiting a previously uncontacted race, automatic probes re sent ahead to learn the new language first.
• X-Men: Doug "Cypher" Ramsey has the mutant ability to translate languages, both human and computer.

• SnarfQuest: A goofy-looking critter called a gaggaleech^note really a very scary "Darkshade Death Leech", but it keeps this secret for obvious reasons gains the ability to communicate with everything due to a ring-granted Wish. It uses this power to play pranks on the other characters, but is forced to change its diet from blood to fruit juice ^note and is extremely annoyed to find that even apples beg for mercy while being drained of their vital fluid because "everything" includes prey.

The Lord of the Rings:

• A Cliché in fan stories is to have an English-speaking girl fall into Middle-earth. Most of these stories ignore the difference between English and Westron, so fans can only guess if there is magic translation, or if the author thinks that the two languages are similar. Fans who read Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings know that English is only a Translation Convention for Westron, the Common Speech of Middle-earth. Only a few stories acknowledge the language difference; one way is via a Language Barrier, the other way is to describe the translation.
  • Among The Eorlingas transforms Veronica into a horse, then dumps her in Rohan. She can understand people, but this confuses her, because people in Rohan should speak Rohirric or Westron, and not any language that she knows. Also, she can understand other horses, and other horses can understand her, but people cannot understand her.
  • In The Games of the Gods, Rachel and Kari failed to notice that English and Sindarin are different languages, until chapter 12, "Realization", when Rachel discovers her "internal translator". She eventually learns to toggle it on and off. The translator also knows Westron and Quenya.
  • Lothíriel is about a Lothíriel from Germany. When she enters Middle-earth, she suddenly knows Westron. The magic does not translate anything; it only causes her to know another language. Lothíriel still can't read the local alphabets, nor speak Sindarin, nor Rohirric, unless she learns them the hard way.
  • Time Will Tell waits until chapter 27 to explain how Jorryn can talk to anyone in Middle-earth. During her first days in the Shire, the ill Jorryn muttered in English. Gandalf performed a spell to switch Jorryn's language. Jorryn now speaks Westron, but may have completely forgotten English.

Other:

• In Amazing Fantasy, Mysterio outfits his robot avatar with a translator that translates his speech into Japanese when he makes his grand debut in Musutafu. The result is noticeably scratchy and artificial, but otherwise does its job perfectly.
• Somewhat highlighted in Bait and Switch (STO)^note and the Foundry mission it adapts when the USS Bajor's universal translator has a second or so of trouble with the Gorn language, kicking in in mid-word. The main cast, despite being mostly nonhumans, are indicated to be actually speaking English most of the time rather than using the translator.
• The Bolt Chronicles: The two aliens Rhino meets in "The Spaceship" are able to speak English using translation collars. Or at least eventually, anyway — they first try Croatian and Filipino, misunderstanding the hamster when he tries to speak what he believes to be outer-space language. The collars prove faulty and provide a lot of malapropisms, though, because they were purchased on the cheap.
• In Children of Time, Sherlock Holmes is intrigued by the TARDIS' translation capabilities.
• A Crown of Stars: The Avaloni characters use a language-teaching tool to communicate with Shinji and Asuka (Shinji decides to use it to learn German and Asuka mutters she will use it to learn to read kanji once and for all). NILS (Neural Induction Learning System) is a device capable to pop a language (or another kind of knowledge) into the brain with a little magnetic induction on the right neurons. It has limitations, though: it only works with sufficiently well mapped knowledge sets and species neural sets, and you need learning a language the old-fashioned way if you want to truly understand it.
• Daily Equestria Life with Monster Girl:
  • The device Cerea is given reaches down to the very concept of language, allowing the wearer to understand any tongue and herself be understood by anyone who hears her. It's stated that this is very powerful and difficult magic: only five of these true translators exist, with the most recently made still being over three centuries old. And even then the translation is somewhat imperfect: Cerea will frequently hear multiple overlapping words as the device struggles to find the closest equivalent to a specific term. There are also lesser translators that are easier to make, but which can only translate between specific pre-encoded languages (and which require that the caster speak all the languages involved).
  • Anyone in Tartarus can understand each other. Since the core of Cerea's device comes from Tartarus (and this is a contributing factor to its rarity), it can be assumed that it works on similar principles. After all, it's advantageous for Tartarus when one inmate can hear the other screaming...
• The Dragon King's Temple: When you pass through a Stargate, it somehow uploads basic proficiency with the dominant language of your destination world.
  • This does, however, depend on having a complete language pack on both ends, which can cause some issues. Gates which aren't used for a while tend to go into standby mode instead of collecting languages, so if you are going to a world that hasn't been used in a while, it won't have an up-to-date language pack to download. Conversely, if your gate hasn't been used in a while, the Gate won't understand your language well enough to make you proficient in the new language. And if you're going from one offworld gate to another the pack for your home language won't be available, and the best you'll get is a partial update building off the already incomplete update for the world you are currently on.
  • There is also the complication that this system is designed to work on Ancient brains. Humans are virtually identical to Ancients, so the system works fine on us, but Gou'ald neuroanatomy is radically different from that of the Ancients, and it's stated that part of the reason the Gou'ald are so nuts is that they're virtually all suffering brain damage from the language transference system.
• The Echo Ranger has a limited example. After the Echo Morpher activates, Izuku finds he is fluent in English, spoken and written, and has a southern California accent, not a Japanese accent.
• In Farce Contact, a Star Trek: Enterprise Parody Fic, the crew smash up Hoshi's translator when it translates I Come in Peace to "I intend to make small bits of you." When they get their hands on a proper Universal Translator, it leads to a diplomatic incident when a vague noise of appreciation by Captain Archer is converted to "You have nice tits." This leads to another famous Starfleet invention: Technobabble, as it's the only way anyone can remain incomprehensible.
• Fate/Black Dawn: Shirou speaks English, but not Old English. He still understands everyone in Camelot, which he ascribes to Gaia looking out for him. Early on, he notes that Morgan's lips aren't quite matching up with the words he hears.
• In Fate/Stay Night: Ultimate Master, the Plumbers give Ben a device that lets him speak and understand Japanese. However, it doesn't help him read it.
• The translator spell in Fire Emblem Heroes: Kiran's Story does not allow the user to understand all the languages as its mother tongue; instead, the more languages a person knows, the more languages get translated. Due to this, Kiran perceives the Askarian as English and the ancient Askarian as Spanish. It's probably used to explain how people from different time periods, continents and even universes are able to understand each other perfectly.
• In The Foreigner, a Beauty and the Beast (1991) fanfic, Gaston and the titular character, an American girl, are unable to communicate with each other until the Enchantress gives her the ability to hear what French people are saying.
• In Fractured (SovereignGFC), the absence of these is actually a plot point—while the Citadel species have had them for years, only the humans make any sense to the Trans-Galactic Republic It may be because the Eridians had a hand in it. Combining asari Mental Fusion with technology eliminates the language barrier, taking us to Translation Convention instead as everyone continues to speak their own language but it is rendered in English for the reader.
• The God Empress of Ponykind: Early in The Empress Returns, Celestia casts a spell on Twilight so she will understand and be able to speak Gothic while they are in the Imperium. She notes that it is temporary, a holdover until she can pick up the language on her own, and the two speak in Equestrian whenever they are alone (which, unfortunately for them, draws suspicions from the Inquisitor escorting them).
• Hunters of Justice:
  • Martian Manhunter is able to act as a translator between the Justice League and teams RWBY and JNPR thanks to his Telepathy. His telepathy helps the group assimilate knowledge better, letting them learn English in a few short weeks.
  • In a non-canon chapter, Starfire demonstrates her Tamaranian ability to learn language through lip contact by kissing Weiss and learning Vytalan.
  • Salem is capable of magic that translates language for a group without the need of telepathy.
• I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: For some reason, Taylor hears and reads everything as English, no matter the actual language. Unfortunately, this effect doesn't work the other way around, and the translation effect makes it impossible for Taylor to learn to write the local language (since she sees English text instead of what is actually being written down). Later on in the series, a pair of magic spectacles that grant the same power are introduced.
• The Omnitrix in Izu-Ju translates any language and works for anyone present, not just the wearer. Izuku never realized as the only foreign language he heard was English, which he had a class for, but Present Mic figures it out when his entire class can understand him singing in Welsh.
• Various examples in The Keys Stand Alone:
  • All the different outworlders, Geddies, Natives, monsters, etc. on C'hou speak the same language because the gods made it so everyone could communicate. Actually, it's really because they're all inside a giant telepathic AI. Meanwhile, it's explicitly noted that the alien gamers in the real world use translation devices. At one point Ikaly asks Dyonmaditi if his device is adequate to handle written language.
  • Whereas the four were under the impression in With Strings Attached that people on C'hou spoke English, Durothé sets them straight in Keys and mentions that the Fans forgot to tell them that either they had changed the language the four spoke whenever they were sent to a different world, or they were given the ability to speak and hear any language as if it were English. With all the more pressing issues everyone has, no one follows up on this.
• Kimberly T's Gargoyles includes a scene where Brooklyn reflects that a language spell was apparently cast on the Manhattan Clan when they awoke in the present day, as they even think in modern English rather than the Gaelic they spoke back when they lived at Wyvern, to the point that they have to make a conscious choice to speak in Gaelic.
• In Left Behind, Crichton and Reyna each observe that Belima, the sole surviving Xarai of Rohvu's original 'crew', doesn't seem to have any translator microbes; Crichton speculates that she 'lost' them after being copied so many times. As a result, Belima has to learn how to talk again from listening to the others; observing that Belima has been talking to Crichton, Chiana and a group of Sebaceans since the other Xarai were killed, Crichton muses at one point that Belima may have formed a new mixed language he jokingly terms 'Nebaceanish'.
• In Mythos Effect, besides the canon translator microbes, humanity has their own variation called Language Recognition Units which are ear pieces that both parties have to wear. Besides sounding robotic with a tinny inflection, it perfectly translates any preprogrammed languages.
• New Vegas Showtime: Out of the three Phantom Thieves that didn't speak English by way of Adaptational Skill, Morgana gets an ability to speak English given to him by his creator, and Ryuji gets it via some mad science performed by the Think Tank.
• The Next Frontier has a heavily downplayed example that's basically the Kerbal equivalent of Google Translate paired with off-the-shelf speech recognition and voice synthesiser software, with a language dictionary that required months of work by thousands of linguists to compile from intercepted satellite TV broadcasts. It also glitches out occasionally when trying to convey a word that doesn't have a direct equivalent, and the first time it gets used it comes out with a bit of Engrish.
• Nobody Cared: There exists a spell that can translate any text into a language the caster can read. In a Flashback, Lucius shows the spell to Severus while explaining a book of elemental magic to him.
• Operation ECLIPSE (Lermis): Tails creates a program on his Miles Electric that allows him to translate Vilmis' language to English and vice-verca. He later creates ear pieces for his friends and anyone he deems important enough so Vilmis can talk out loud without the others needing to wait for a translation, and he adds the same program to Vilmis' omnitool (along with a speaker function to talk to people who don't have ear pieces). There's also a text translation function. All that said, the translator is quite flawed, because it tends to translate words very literally, so contractions, figures of speech, and even certain words come out wrong on the other end.
• Resonance Days: Magical Girls and Witches in the afterlife are actually Energy Beings, but because they are used to having bodies, they subconsciously manifest a body to move around like normal. As a result, even though they are actually communicating telepathically, they still perceive it as talking and hearing normally, and will hear any language spoken as their native language. This even applies to Starfish Languages like the Calliopes, who's native language is made from shifting lights and patterns. It also has an interesting effect with natural telepaths like the Andalites, causing a strange "echo" effect since they're effectively using double telepathy.
• In Son of the Western Sea, Percy receives this courtesy of the Braden Feasa/Salmon of Knowledge, who as thanks for sparing him gifts Percy the ability to speak and understand every language. He still has dyslexia, but notes that he isn't going to complain. He only realises exactly what the gift is when Manannan Mac Lir informs him that he is conversing with the god in fluent Manx Gaelic.
• Tales of the Canterlot Deportation Agency: Any human who arrives in Menajeria gains the ability to speak and understand the dominant native language of the region they arrived in. However, this only works for that one language, and it only works if both parties are in Menajeria.
• Time Turned Back: Gabriel, Severus, and Remus wear translation amulets during their summer in China to allow them to speak with the locals since none of them speak Chinese.
• Under the Northern Lights: Twilight Sparkle knows a spell, developed using combined unicorn and zebra magics, that temporarily learns a language from a native speaker instantly. It has some minor issues: you automatically gain the "teacher's" dialect and vocabulary, and the casting process is potentially embarrassing. Of course, Twilight causes misunderstandings due to the latter.
• Vow of the King: Anyone in Soul Society or Hueco Mundo can understand each other perfectly as there's apparently no language barrier between souls. This first comes up when Candice seemingly goes from You No Take Candle to speaking fluent Japanese, only for her to insist the others are speaking fluent Irish.
• White: It is eventually revealed that in spiritual realms like Soul Society, Hueco Mundo, and Yhwach's realm, everyone hears speech in their native language, though certain terms like honorifics remain unchanged. While explaining this to Yuzu, Bambietta comments that while the former is hearing everything in Japanese, she is hearing everything in German.

• Brother Bear: Kenai gets the ability to hear what animals are saying after being turned into a bear.
• In Doraemon: Nobita's Chronicles of the Moon Exploration, the gang encounters a race of Human Aliens known as Espals, who somehow knows how to speak the human tongue, achieved by the Espals using telepathy to read minds, and process the information they received before responding in any language they want.
• Elio: All members of the Communiverse are given a special device called a "Communidisk", which is a blue disk they attach to themselves. It not only allows everyone to communicate between species without trouble, but it also helps control their own gravity and regulate their body temperature.
• The heroine in The Legend of the Titanic becomes able to speak with dolphins after her tear falls on a dolphin's nose in the moonlight. It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context as it does here, which is to say no damn sense at all.
• Pocahontas: Grandma Smith, a talking willow tree, gives John Smith the ability to hear what Native Americans are saying. It eventually turns out that Grandma Willow actually gave Pocahontas the ability to communicate with English people, as none of the other Native Americans are able to speak to John Smith in English.
• The Princess and the Frog: Tiana and Naveen get the ability to hear what animals are saying after being turned into frogs.

• Anon (2018): A policeman questions a maid in English and she responds in her own language, with Minds Eye providing simultaneous translation for both parties.
• Barbarella: Barbarella understands the Sogoites' language thanks to the multi-purpose bracelet on her left wrist translating it for her.
• In Battlefield Earth, the Psychlos have a device that can teach humans their language, which they only use on one human because they didn't consider the "man-animals" intelligent enough to teach, despite all contrary evidence.
• Carnage: Swallowing The Past: The ability to translate the thoughts of animals is what ultimately leads to the banning of meat.
• The Cat from Outer Space has its leading character wear a collar that translates the wearer's thoughts into people's heads.
• Cloud Atlas: When Meronym and Zachry happen upon Sonmi's orison, the computer playing it translates her Korean to English in real-time. This wasn't present in the novel; when Zachry watches the orison he can't understand what Sonmi is saying.
• Dr. Dolittle: The title character gets the ability to hear what animals are saying, a childhood ability that he lost as he grew up, but miraculously came back when he runs a dog over and it calls him a bonehead.
• Galaxy Quest has some sort of translators. They appear to work for the Thermians (the friendly aliens) in a similar way to Klingons, with exclamations in their alien language often remaining untranslated. Oddly, the translators are devices used by the Thermians to make themselves understood, yet the antagonist aliens (an unnamed reptilian species) also appear to speak English despite never having even heard of humans before. Being a comedy, it probably shouldn't be expected to make too much sense. The translators are clearly integrated with the Thermian ships (on which all of the main characters' dealing with Sarris and his species take place). They're the ones translating for them, just as they do with the newly-discovered species in the mining colony during the "Gorignak" sequence.
• Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever: Crystal gets the ability to hear what the title character is saying.
• The Inhabited Island features this; when Maxim lands on planet Saraksh and meets a native, he puts a little "snake" in his ear, that allows him to understand and speak the Sarakshian language. In the original Strugatsky Brothers novel, Maxim actually studied Sarakshian language for months until he was able to speak and understand a bit. The film, reasonably, could not be made fully in fictional language with subtitles, especially since the book provides very few examples of Sarakshian. Oddly enough, many of Maxim's awkward lines from when he knew Sarakshian bad are still there, despite now we presume he knows the language already.
• In The Last Starfighter, one of the first things that happens to the hero once he arrives at the Starfighter base is a small disk attached to his lapel that translates brain waves so he hears perfect English, even though that's not what's actually being spoken. The movie then switches to Translation Convention in a later scene.
• Mars Attacks!: A scientist devises a computer-powered machine to aide communication with the Martians. How well it functions is a point of ambiguity throughout the film. The initial message from the Martian Emperor is a complete Translation Trainwreck that makes very little sense in English, assuming the whole thing wasn't just a massive joke by the Martians. When it's used to translate back to the Martians they at least recognize the sounds although it's unknown if what was being said made sense to them. The fact that the Martians may also be cruel liars is also a factor, as they continue shouting comments translated as "We come in peace!" while atomising people. The device itself is small enough to be carried around by hand, but takes a second to broadcast whatever the user says in the translated language. It should be noted that the Martians don't need the machine to understand what the humans say. Going by the fact that a female Martian assassin nods her head at one point when asked a question by a human, and the way the Martians react hearing the president's speech, they, while only speaking their own language, can understand English just fine.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), there is a Freeze-Frame Bonus demonstrating this trope when Peter Quill is being put into the system. The screen the prison guards are looking at notes that Peter's implanted helmet has a translation circuit in it. Other than Groot's language, it seems to work rather well. Presumably Translation Convention is in place for all scenes that Peter is not present. In fact, Word of God has confirmed that most space-faring sorts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have two-way universal translators embedded in their bodies.
  • In fact, Captain Marvel (2019) explicitly shows a universal translator used by the title character upon arriving on Earth. Carol doesn't actually need it as she's originally from Earth but the scene of her using the translator takes place before she recovers her memories.
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has a different kind of translator. The Quantum Realm inhabitant Veb (and presumably others of his species) produces a type of pink ooze that when drank allows you to understand the language spoken in the Quantum Realm. Janet gets Hank and Hope glasses of a similar ooze in a bar that lets them understand the locals too.
• Men in Black (1997) mentions a translator, along with the fact human thought is considered a disease by some aliens.
• Paul: Appropriately for a sci-fi homage/parody, Simon Pegg thinks this is how Paul is speaking English. He's wrong:
  Paul: Actually, I'm speaking English, you fucking idiot.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu: Tim has the ability to hear Detective Pikachu speak English. It's later revealed that this is because Detective Pikachu is actually Tim's father.
• Predator: Badlands. When Weyland-Yutani synthetic Thia first sees Dek, she cycles through a couple of other languages before addressing him in the Yautja language. Due to Translation Convention this is rendered as English, a fact that's handwaved as everyone hearing their own language due to the Universal Translator she's programmed with.
• The alien Zarab from Shin Ultraman explains that he uses a translator device upon being questioned about how he understands Japanese. Asami testing him by speaking in Russian shows that it works perfectly for any language.
• Tails from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) can speak perfect English but has to use a translator to repeat what he says in Siberian though it gives offensive My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels translations.
• Star Trek:
  • Subverted in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when the crew of the Enterprise has to slip past Klingon border guards to rescue Kirk and McCoy but don't use the universal translator for fear that the Klingons will find out they're using it. Uhura had to speak Klingon but struggled mightily with it... and they let the Enterprise go anyway. This was a controversial scene; Nichelle Nichols objected to it on the grounds that her character should be able to speak fluent Klingon, but she was overruled; the reboot has Uhura indeed speaking fluent Klingon (despite claiming to be "rusty"). It's equally stupid for the Klingons to see through Translator Microbes but not clearly broken Klingon; the novelization explained this by saying the Klingons mistook Uhura for an inept smuggler and let her go out of pity (and gave them a little message in smuggler's code to let them know he was on to them), which makes much more sense.
  • In Star Trek Beyond, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise give Kalara a more realistic variation — you hear her speak an alien language and a computerised voice speaking English at the same time.
• Transformers (2007) gives the first attempt in the franchise to explain why the robots are capable of speaking English just fine: their minds access the internet and are able to assimilate personality quirks appropriate to them, such as Jazz talking and acting like a hip black guy (itself based on the G1 character, voiced by renowned black musician Scatman Crothers), and 'Bee implicitly being a Back to the Future fan. Both Megatron and Frenzy speak in both English and mumble in what seems to be a Cybertronian language.

• An alien asks a human about deserts on Earth. The human responds, "Let's see there's the Sahara, the Gobi, the Kalahari..." but the alien just looks at him confused because all she heard through the translator was the Desert, the Desert, and the Desert.

• The Afterward: Translation spells exists which people who don't know the same language use, or to translate documents in unknown languages as well.
• Alcatraz Series: A pair of magical glasses that grant this power is considered one of the most dangerous objects in the world, on the basis that knowledge is power. They give the ability to read the Forgotten Language. The Incarna, who wrote in this language, had access to magic and technology several orders of magnitude beyond that of the heroes or villains, but Alcatraz Smedry the First "broke" their language, rendering it utterly incomprehensible to anything short of the Translator's Lenses.
• Animorphs: All Andalites in the military have translator chips implanted into their brains that can translate any language after being exposed to a decent sample of it. In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, on making First Contact with Hork-Bajir an Andalite points to a tree, says 'tree', and has the Hork-Bajir call it their word and expand on the topic until enough of a sample of the language has been captured to generate a translation. Andalite "thought speak" can be understood by any sentient being, because it communicates concepts with "universal symbols" in addition to specific words. Some Andalite words and ideas don't easily translate and appear as italicized words like nothlit, a morpher who's experienced Shapeshifter Mode Lock. The translator chip is also shown having limitations: in The Andalite Chronicles Elfangor and Arboron are baffled when Loren refers to to a Skrit Na as "Twinkie", and similarly Ax is often confused by slang and pop culture references. Several other alien species the Animorphs encounter (Iskoort, Leerans, Mercora, Helmacrons) also use thought-speech and easily communicate with anyone. The Animorphs only speak to the Leerans using thought-speech themselves. The Ellimist arranges for the Animorphs to be intelligible to the Iskoort, the Mercora work something out offscreen after taking the humans in, and Helmacrons just show up able to comprehend English.
• Armada has a primitive version that isn't too far-fetched. The wrist-mounted devices detect (human) spoken languages and provide a slightly-delayed text translation. Translations appear to be pretty close to what's intended, implying better computing technology and linguistic algorithms. In fact, only one important character speaks almost no English, being from China, but the devices allow everyone else to understand him.
• Artemis Fowl: Fairies communicate in and understand any language. In the early books, it was claimed that fairies were the first race to develop language and every other language (including animal languages, such as dog and dolphin) is an adaptation of Gnomish, but it was later Ret Conned to being one of the benefits of having inherent magical talent.
• The Bird King: The island of Qaf/Antillia was created out of magic, and standing on the shores of the island allows every character to understand any language spoken by any other character. This is how Fatima and Hassan (two Iberians who speak Castillian, Arabic, and Sabir) can understand Gwennec (a Breton who knows Latin) can understand Mary (a washerwoman from Cornwall) can understand Deng (a doctor from Timbuktu), and eventually how they can understand the language spoken by all the other refugees who wash up on the island.
  At night, they sang. It was in singing that they realized they had no common language: Hassan wondered aloud how Mary had come to know songs in Arabic, and she told him, baffled, that she was singing in the language of her own damp corner of Cornwall. Deng lapsed into his mother tongue without thinking as he taught them rounds learned in childhood on the red plains below the Nile, yet Fatima understood him just the same; Gwennec tried Latin and then Breton and sounded as he always had.
• Bounders: The Tunnelers, mole-like aliens, wear boxes around their necks that translate their clicking noises into human speech.
• Castle Perilous is wrapped in a translator spell to serve its numerous interdimensional "guests".
• A Chronicle Of Lies: Initially, Vincent doesn't understand the language the Falians are speaking and the Falians don't understand Vincent speaking English. But after Vincent gets involved in two separate incidents that caused him trauma, he's able to understand the Falians and vice versa, which gets revealed in a later chapter that this is actually something causing Vincent to be able to speak several different languages unconsciously while processing everything as English. This gets tested when he's asked a question in the Trates dialect (a very difficult to learn dead language) and he answers it flawlessly without realizing it.
• In Cooking with Wild Game, one of the few magical elements in the setting is that Asuta and Ai Fa can understand each other perfectly. Well, almost perfectly — she can't pronounce his surname very well.
• The Cosmere:
  • The Stormlight Archive:
    • Implied, though yet to be explained. A number of people show up with no trouble communicating despite having been away for over 4000 years or being from another world. Notably Zahel, aka Vasher, speaks Alethi perfectly but carelessly uses idioms entirely foreign to those around him, an extremely unlikely mistake for someone who'd learned the language naturally.
    • Bondsmiths can temporarily gain the ability to speak a language by touching someone who speaks it and forming a spiritual Connection.
    • Parshendi who metamorphose into Envoyform gain the ability to speak all languages and understand all direct communication. This is implied to work through spiritual Connection as it picks up on the intent behind the communication, such that even hums and hand gestures can be translated into complete sentences.
  • One type is seen in The Bands of Mourning, though it's unlikely to be the same type used in Stormlight. Duralumin metalminds allow Feruchemists to store various types of Connection. If they put all of their Connection to their homeland in one metalmind, they can then put "blank" Connection in another metalmind. If someone uses this metalmind, they suddenly have no Connection to a homeland. Their soul will then automatically Connect to the closest land, which has the side effect of allowing them to speak the language as if they were raised there (though accents are preserved because of the dichotomy between mind and soul). Unfortunately, this only works for visitors to a land, because having someone Connect to their own homeland is just redundant.
• The Crowned Kreg series by Olga Larionova is Darker and Edgier Space Opera, so the protagonists learned the language of star-traveling Human Aliens via a memory-writing device and used it normally in the first book, but later (when frantic planet-hopping started) the team laid their hands on magical translators. Those worked with any sentient creature using any form of spoken language but frequently translated speech as a strange or broken dialect and sometimes (on a more unusual subject) as an incomprehensibly weird puzzle, forcing the user to ask a partner in conversation to explain the same in other words and then try to put it all together.
• The Daevabad Trilogy: The Nahid tribe of djinn have the unique power to understand and become fluent in any language as soon as they hear it spoken. However, it doesn't work on writing or on the Supernatural Language of the rival Geziri tribe.
• Discworld:
  • Starting in Snuff, Commander Vimes' Symbiotic Possession by the demon called the Summoning Dark allows him to understand and communicate with any creature while in complete darkness.
  • Tiffany Aching, after events in A Hat Full of Sky. The occupation of her mind by the creature that collected minds has left her with shadows of those memories, including a deceased, didactic wizard named Sensibility Bustle, who translates any foreign word inside her head upon hearing or seeing it.
• In the Dragonfall 5 sci-fi juveniles by Brian Earnshaw, there were twin alien animals that carried out this function. Played for laughs when they have a scientist traveling on the ship; he gets rather annoyed when they kept translating his Spock Speak, e.g. "Negative!" as "He means no."
• In the Dreamers tetralogy by David Eddings, four Physical Gods assemble an army from around the world and enchant them all to hear each other's speech in their own native tongue. The more observant warriors notice that their foreign comrades' lips are moving out of sync with the words they hear.
• In The Dresden Files, a Fallen Angel trying to tempt Harry into a quite literal deal with the devil provides perfect two-way translation (of various languages including Latin and ancient Etruscan) as one of several favors it does for Harry. He knows he shouldn't keep relying on it, but...
• Elcenia: Elcenian dragons can do this as a native trait, and there are a number of wizard spells that do the same thing for speech and written language. A sufficiently odd language — for instance, wolfrider, which includes a telepathic part — is not fully translated by standard spells, and poetry and songs translated do not rhyme.
• Empress of Forever: Despite being hurled thousands of years into the future, Viv can understand and speak to everyone perfectly fine. This is an early sign that she isn't as "soulless" as she seems. There's a moment where Hong tells her that a certain class of Pride warship is called, in the holy texts, "close air support", and she's bemused to realize that Hong is saying it in a sacred language that’s also getting translated to her in plain terms.
• Falling With Folded Wings: Everyone in the System receives the System Language Integration skill by default, letting them communicate with everyone with ease. However, it seems like the System doesn't bother integrating the lowest-energy species, such as the yeksa. While most people assume that this means they are sub-intelligent beasts, the humans theorize that they could be perfectly intelligent, the System just doesn't care about them.
• The Familiar of Zero: The Halkeginian language is magically translated into Japanese and vice-versa for the benefit of Saito and his interlocuters, an effect he apparently received as part of his summoning. The limitations of this form of translation became apparent in later volumes when Saito tries to learn the Halkeginian script and realizes that he's reading the words as if they were translated idiomatically, which is not a problem if he just wants to understand the overall meaning of the text but becomes a problem if he wants to understand it literally.
• The Fantastic Flying Journey: Great-Uncle Perceval's grey powder provides the users with the ability to communicate fluently with animals.
• Fate/strange Fake: The Japanese Ayaka Sajyou is contacted by Filia who orders her to travel to Snowfield, Nevada and participate in the Holy Grail War. Ayaka only speaks Japanese, so Filia casts a spell on her to allow her to speak and understand English.
• Flash Gordon:
  • In The Lion Men of Mongo, Hans Zarkov invents a lingual-translator that implants in himself, Flash and Dale and lets them understand, read and speak any language.
  • The Novelization of Flash Gordon (1980) mentions that Emperor Ming had the local language "beamed" into Flash and co.'s heads as their ship was landing on Mongo.
• Gods of Jade and Shadow: Upon passing into the United States, Casiopea is startled to discover she can understand English perfectly. Hun-Kamé explains that death speaks all languages, and reminds her of his bone shard in her finger that links them when she doesn't see why that should apply to her too. At the end, after regaining his full godhood and breaking the link, he grants her this power forever.
• In The Grey Horse, Ruairí the púca can magically understand and speak any language as long as he has his feet on the ground. Paved roads and houses with proper floors don't count as on the ground, which occasionally causes him problems.
• Grimoire's Soul: Outside of Kesterline, translation spells are fairly common for dealing with people from various locales, as shown in the Atrium. However, the translation spells don't always translate things completely.
• Harry Potter: The books introduce a few Starfish Languages that are normally unintelligible to human ears but can be understood via this trope. Submersion in water allows humans to communicate with merfolk in Mermish, and a rare hereditary trait allows certain humans to communicate with snakes in Parseltongue. It should also be noted that some humans can manage to understand and/or speak these languages without the use of translator microbes. For example, Albus Dumbledore learned to decipher Mermish and Parseltongue through study, and Ron Weasley manages to mimic the Parseltongue password to the Chamber of Secrets at one point (though his imitation of the password just sounds like unintelligible hissing to Harry).
• Her Spell: Lysander College is under a translator spell which lets its students and teachers, who hail from all over the world, understand each other's languages to talk without difficulty. Rings also exist that translate for their wearers.
• High School D×D: The "Gift of Languages" is a built-in perk of being reincarnated as a devil. Issei notes that he's had to start fudging his English classes so the teacher doesn't ask questions. It doesn't extend to written words, though, as a couple of native English speakers comment that they're still studying literacy despite being "fluent" when speaking.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy uses the "Babel Fish", though in this case the ridiculous nature of the translation device (inserted in the ear) probably means its use is satirical — like most things in the series. The fish itself is named after the biblical Tower of Babel myth. The babel fish, as it is known, subsists entirely on sound waves. A side effect is that these sound waves are converted into brain waves, which are excreted by the fish into the host's brain. It also proves the non-existence of God, much to God's consternation. (According to Oolon Colluphid, anyway. Some people think it's all a load of dingo's kidneys.)
• Marion Zimmer Bradley disliked this trope and tried not to use it; when she resorted to it in Hunters of the Red Moon, the translator sometimes wouldn't convey cultural nuances or figures of speech.
• Impossible Creatures (2023): If a human holds a sphinx's tooth in their mouth, they can understand any language.
• Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle): For the most part, the sinners in Hell speak and understand what they spoke and understood in life. However, certain souls are selectively granted the gift of tongues, the ability to understand and be understood by all. As a rule, it seems to be granted to those souls who choose to dedicate themselves to the task of saving others. It can even grant the ability to pierce Nimrod's unintelligibility.
• In Jacek Dukaj's Irrehaare, all the people trapped in the titular virtual reality can communicate with each other freely. They don't really talk to each other; they just communicate directly via thoughts, and the controlling computer creates the sensation of hearing spoken words (along with the vague impression of hearing a specific language or accent).
• A fantasy variant of this exist in Isekai Kenkokuki: the Divine Blessing of Language, which helps Almus get past the initial Language Barrier. The Blessing is temporary, though, as he needs to return to the griffin later so he quickly gets to work learning the other world's language.
• In I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, Azusa dies in modern, mundane Japan and is reincarnated into a Medieval European Fantasy world. Among other beneficial perks, she is capable of understanding, reading, writing, and speaking the local language straight away.
• Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse: Krakau involved in uplifting humans have translators that resemble pearls implanted in their throats. Similar translators are built into the tech in general, but it's not quite the "there are no language barriers" sort of thing that's usual for the trope. The translation of names is brought up repeatedly, and of pronouns as many alien species don't sort into male and female.
• Joel Suzuki: Marshall has manipulated the Aura in Spectraland so that when the natives speak their language, Joel and Felicity hear them in English, and vice versa. The spell doesn't affect lip movements, making every conversation look like a badly dubbed movie.
• In Journey to the Morning Star, an old man (a self-proclaimed wizard), his granddaughter, and three neighboring boys travel using the wizard's "thoughtplane" (a craft allowing travel "at the speed of thought" anywhere in the universe) to a planet in the Coma Berenices constellation, where they meet Human Aliens from two of the three planets in the system (the third one still has dinosaurs). They are able to speak to the Etherians and the Sinots through a box that the wizard brings with him and wears on his chest. It should be noted that it's very clear that there is a slight lag between the original speech and the translation from the box, as well as the fact that the translated voice is coming from a different direction. It's not clear how the Etherians and the Sinots communicate, although they may have just learned each other's languages.
• Kris Longknife: After going through Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!, Kris' computer Nelly develops the ability to act as a universal translator, letting her decipher the language of newly contacted alien species given sufficient samples of it. She (and later her children) can then provide translation on the fly.
• Kyo Kara Maoh!: Yuuri cannot understand a word anyone is saying to him in the magical world at first, until he gets zapped with language magic (or something), after which he can understand everyone perfectly.
• Last Son of Krypton: While Lex Luthor is being held by a group of aliens, they call him an "Earthling". He comments that he prefers the term "Terran", and the aliens explain that their translator returns the best word to the being hearing the translation, based on his/her/its own perceptions. Thereafter, he hears the word "Terran". He also amuses himself by mentally assigning all the aliens insulting nicknames, which the translator accepts as the translation of their names.
• In the Left Behind series, God enables people to hear the messages of the Two Witnesses supernaturally in their own languages, even though they are natively speaking Hebrew. Later on in the book series, God also enables all believers in Jesus Christ to speak to and understand each other in their own languages.
• Lensman: The Lenses provide near-perfect translation. Near-perfect because it still has to sometimes make up words for concepts that have no human equivalent. Once one Lens picks an English word for an alien concept all Lenses will translate it the same way.
• Magical Security Taskforce: The magical drug Lucidrol, used primarily by transfer student Yuki. It has a few interesting side effects: the user cannot discern which language is being spoken to her, including his/her native tongue. It also translates crazed ranting and poor handwriting. Another character takes a dose to translate a complicated legal contract.
• Make Way For Dragons: The hero is one of the few people on Earth who can do magic (that's why he met the dragons). Despite his ever-increasing talents, when he finds he can talk to dogs (a dog), his other non-human friends just hear barking.
• Mangoverse: The story story "Aviva and the Aliens" has the aliens use "translator boxes" to speak with her in Aviva's language. However, this is usually avoided in the series, with people having to use any shared words they have when they don't know the same languages.
• In the 1981 novel Megalodon by Robin Brown, the protagonist has developed the Janus device, a computer/vocoder/translator which enables him to teach two dolphins (nicknamed Doris and Macho) and a killer whale (Morgan) a rudimentary language (their own language is sophisticated enough to communicate three-dimensional sonar images — it's converting that into a language simple enough to be translated that's the problem).
• The Merman's Children: In Greenland, Panigpak the angakok gives Tauno and Eyjan an amulet which, when worn, gives them the ability to understand, speak, and think in any language. It also gives them the ability to understand concepts their native language doesn't have words for, without anyone needing to explain those concepts to them, as long as they keep thinking in the new language.
• The mirrors of Mordant's Need can summon sentient creatures from all manner of bizarre worlds into the world of Mordant, and they all turn out to be able to speak the local language (at least if they have the right sort of vocal chords for it). The magicians who use mirrors differ on why that is, but one of the two dominant theories is that this trope is in effect — the mirror changes the language you speak when you move through it.
• Morgan and Merlin's Excellent Adventures: It's only mentioned off-hand halfway through the novel that everything is being translated for Morgan's benefit. It's probably a side effect of being in the body of a young boy who grew up in the era, but Merlin does have to update her vocabulary to account for Kentish at one point.
• In Donald Keith's Mutiny In The Time Machine, the preteen protagonists end up in the distant future and a boy they befriend gives them a pill which enables them to telepathically understand each other's version of English. He comes back to the then-present with them and they later use the pills to communicate with everything from a Spartan youth to a dog.
• In the My Teacher Is an Alien book series, the aliens have a universal translator that is implanted into the brain. Every species speaks its native language, and an individual hears the alien language with their ears, but the translator makes them aware of what it means. This implant is also capable of translating non-verbal communication as well, as some of the species don't have vocal cords. This trope is also applied directly, in that the aliens who are sent to Earth as teachers have a second implant that causes them to speak English.
• In Mythic Misadventures, Pandora and her friends consume the ashes of Calchas, a legendary linguist. This gives them the ability to speak and understand all languages.
• The Neanderthal Parallax: In Hominids, Ponter, a Neaderthal from an Alternate Universe where Neanderthals and not Homo Sapiens survived, uses his implant to communicate with people from a universe like ours where English is spoken and homo sapiens survived. This is especially important as Neanderthals cannot produce the long-e sound, making a lot of Homo Sapiens words unpronounceable naturally by them.
• The New Jedi Order: As part of their biotechnology, the Yuuzhan Vong have tizowyrms, small Translator Worms which can be inserted in the ear to understand foreign languages. Somehow, it also allows them to speak unaccented Basic. Threepio is also quickly able to decipher their language, since it's similar to one in his database.
• In the Night Watch (Series) books, while in the Twilight, all languages are automatically translated into the listener's primary language. This allows Anton to have a friendly conversation with an American soldier on leave while in Prague. There are also spells that temporarily teach an Other a number of commonly-used languages. This is useful for short trips abroad. This also has side effects of occasionally having the Other in question slip into another language without knowing. Anton accidentally slips into Polish and only realizes it when Olga points it out to him. He's then surprised that Polish is considered common enough to be included in the spell.
• No Game No Life: Sora and Shiro note that the humans in Disboard speak in Japanese, but the written language is different. They quickly learn how to read it in an hour, though Jibril does state that there are over 700 languages in Disboard which she knows how to translate, and Izuna is noted to have just recently learned how to speak in their language.
• The Brain Pals in Old Man's War translate alien languages for their users, but only if the language is known to the Colonial Defense Force.
• Orion: First Encounter has a literal example, as the crew uses a virus to translate alien speech. It isn't foolproof, though — the virus has a tendency to add artistic flair in the form of accents and can't do conversions for distances because it can't be bothered to do the math.
• Done in Otherland because computer technology has evolved to the point where simultaneous voice translation is a standard feature of the 'Net. There are cases where this fails due to linguistic nuances or a character speaking in a language that the translation software doesn't recognize.
• The Outside: Sispirinithas, an alien who resembles a Giant Spider, wears a box around his neck that translates everything he says into Earth creole. Diamond-Chip, a member of another alien species called Boaters, also has a translator box, but humans' poor understanding of Boater languages results in tortured and hard-to-understand sentences.
• In Overlord (2012), Momonga notes that he can hear the denizens of the New World speak in Japanese even though their lips move differently and concludes that some magical force must be translating, though it doesn't translate their written language. Momonga does own a pair of magic glasses that let him read the local language.
• Past Doctor Adventures:
  • In Imperial Moon, the TARDIS translation circuits essentially provide a vital clue; when the Doctor realises that he and Turlough should have been able to understand the Phiadorians in their first encounter, he deduces that the Phiadorians' subsequent ability to speak English was not the result of a telepathic download from Turlough, but in fact the result of them consuming brain enzymes from a murdered Victorian lieutenant, and they just faked the rescue to give them an excuse to speak English.
  • Wolfsbane also affirms that translation can go deeper than just translating from one language to another; the Doctor talks with a native German speaker who has a good understanding of English, and who explicitly muses that she cannot tell what language the Doctor is addressing her in.
• The Pendragon Adventure begins with Bilingual Dialogue — Uncle Press and a Denduron native communicate while understanding each other perfectly. Once Bobby's Traveller nature kicks in, he gains the ability to read and understand the languages of all the other Territories. Presumably, it applies to acolytes too, since Mark and Courtney get messages from Spader, Aja and others that are somehow in English. Possibly they are translated by the rings used to send the messages between territories, given that when acolytes use them they are addressed to a specific person, not a territory in general. For some reason though, some languages seem like they must be the same as English. For example, in The Pilgrims of Rayne, some people think a sign says "Rubity" when really it was worn down and originally said Rubic City. Since proper nouns presumably have no translation, and Rubic City is a combination of a proper noun and a common, translatable noun, this would only make sense in English.
• Phantom Server: A semantic processor is an in-game implant that allows the player to understand alien speech. It's one of the first implants Zander gets, as he's captured by Dargian slavers early on, and they really don't like it when their slaves don't understand their orders.
• The Phule's Company novels have translator software that can even work when making First Contact with aliens who "speak" in telepathic imagery. (Well, more or less. The alien captain is amazed at how infallible the translator is, until he refers to Phule as "Captain Clown" and Phule corrects him "That's Captain Clown.")
• The Polity has two different implants that serve this function: Augs (the standard brain implants wore by everyone) provided instantaneous translation of recognized languages, while the more advanced Gridlinks actually downloaded the language directly into the user's head, essentially making them native speakers of it.
• In the Prince Roger series, the majority of the translation is provided by toots (computers implanted in the user's brain), but the toot still needs to have something with one or two degrees of relation to the language in use before it can start trying to translate. Things aren't smooth — they find out in March to the Stars that the original language sample they've been working from all along has been strategically edited to make all mentions of the locals' new religious habits incredibly euphemistic. Since the locals are now ritualistic cannibals and they're asking for Prince Roger's girlfriend as a sacrifice, Prince Roger is, understandably, Not Pleased to find this out. It doesn't end well for the locals. Additionally, since the native Mardukans lack toots entirely, they have to learn all languages and dialects the hard way.
• Given a cruel sort of twist in Princess of the Void. Taiikari biotech makes it possible to inject an alien with a specialized implant that enables them to understand the Taiikari language. However, it does this by hijacking the subject's existing linguistic neural connections. Grant can speak Taiikari now... but he has lost access to English in turn, which causes him no small amount of pain.
• Relentless Potential: Thomas is amazed by the fact he can speak, read, and understand the language of the world he was transmigrated to, though it fails to account for the figures of speech, as the people of the new world are unfamiliar with them.
• In The Riftwar Cycle, one of the few magic spells permitted in Honest John's is a universal translation spell — though it's mentioned that the spell would have trouble with sufficiently starfishy aliens due to being unable to find a common frame of reference.
• Rod Allbright Alien Adventures: Citizens of galactic society get brain implants that let them understand and speak alien languages, although some idioms slip through. In the third book, the Earth natives and Seymour get them so they can speak Standard Galactic.
• The Saint's Magic Power Is Omnipotent: Sei and Aira, two women brought from Earth, can instantly understand the language of the Medieval European Fantasy kingdom Slantania. They can speak fluently and without issue, and even any written language is conveniently turned to Japanese. This is particularly useful for languages that even locals have issues with, like the Ancient Script used for foundational magical books.
• Deconstructed in A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics. Sara, who comes from a magical world to Japan, claims to be using translation magic to understand Japanese. Sousuke thinks this is a bit off, as unlike the usual magical effect, language translation would require established database of words, grammar, et cetera. Even if the magic scans surrounding conversations to build its own language database, Sara could speak Japanese from the first time she fell on Sousuke. He hypothesizes that the magic must involve mind-reading, but rejects it, as Sara can watch TV and read Japanese with no issue. Adding the facts that she is a fan of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and how she takes slang a bit too literally, he comes to the conclusion that she must already understand Japanese in the first place, and the world she came from must be an alternate Japan instead of any other fantasy world.
• Second Apocalypse: When Prince Sorweel is imprisoned in a Nonman mansion, a helm is placed on his head that merges his soul with a long-dead Nonman, allowing him to understand the Nonman language, giving him knowledge of Nonman customs and providing Character Development as he gains a new perspective on his situation.
• In the Sector General series, translator packs are Walkman-sized devices that must be body-worn (typically on a lanyard around whatever anatomical landmark corresponds to the neck), only work for known languages, and can't translate vocal inflections, nonverbal communication, context cues or (amusingly) foul language. They're dumb terminals running the hospital mainframe's translation program, which isn't a whole lot better than a modern Web translator - and when the mainframe crashes, as in the Etlan "police action" (read: minor war) of Star Surgeon, chaos results.
• In Gregory Frost's novel Shadowbridge, the world is filled with incredibly long bridges, divided into spans. Each span has its own language, but visitors will magically find themselves fluent in it a few minutes after entering.
• The Shakugan no Shana novels mention an Unrestricted Spell that performs this task; presumably, everyone is just using that all the time.
• The Ship Who...: First Contact Team Carialle and Keff have a machine designed as a translator. Keff speaks into it and it translates his words, then translates the response, but it's not magic and requires a lot of work on his part to build up a vocabulary and find words that best fit, so initial conversations are usually quite stilted. Unlike many examples, though, the two do actually learn the languages themselves and seek to be able to speak them without technological help, the translator just makes it easier.
• In the Spaceforce (2012) universe, everyone wears (or has implanted) a piece of micro-technology which provides real-time translation of speech, though not necessarily of written language. It’s not perfect, however. Earther translators seem to render speech as somewhat stilted, while Taysan translators are more effective.
• In Stardoc, Dr. Cherijo Grey Veil uses a translator earpiece to understand the various aliens who come to the hospital she works at on Kevarzangia 2. It uses a wireless connection to a municipal computer database which translates incoming alien tongues. The earpiece then retransmits them as the wearer's native tongue. When Cherijo joins the Jorenians later on, we're treated to the Jorenian equivalent, the vocollar, whose only difference is that it's worn about the neck.
• In many Star Trek novels, the communication pins have translator devices. Rihannsu, which predates combadges (being based on Star Trek: The Original Series), instead states the translator to be a subcutaneous implant.
• Terminate the Other World!: NSLICE-00P is surprised to discover that the System automatically translates for her. This is apparently a perk unique to Dungeon Masters (though that is not common knowledge), so everyone else is pretty surprised too.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime:
  • Zig-zagged overall. Unless you got a Skill that translates the language for you when crossing over, at first everything in the native tongue will sound like gibberish, and the same with the writing. This is best shown when Masayuki first arrives, where he couldn't understand anyone until his Unique Skill began to trigger, and the written language was still beyond him. However, as Otherworlders are common enough in this world, there do exist translators for all sorts of languages. In the Eastern Empire in particular, new Otherworlders are brought to Gadra specifically because he's mastered so many languages from his centuries of life around Otherworlders, which allows him to serve well as a teacher in teaching them the spoken and written language.
  • When Rimuru first arrived in the new world, he didn't even have the ability to speak, being a slime. His first "conversations" with Great Sage and Veldora were done via Thought Communication where the intent of the speakers was conveyed to them. After Rimuru gained the necessary abilities to speak, Great Sage helped with translating the languages until he figured it out himself.
  • Yuuki admits to envying both Rimuru and Masayuki, since when he first arrived he didn't understand the spoken or written language at all. He credits a good teacher for getting him so far that being the spirit of the one who tried to summon him to steal his body in the first place.
• Time Cat has a magic example. Jason and Gareth — a boy and a cat, respectively — travel through time while Gareth's magic allows Jason to understand and speak the common language of whatever place and time period he's in.
• Timeline (1999): The time travellers have earpieces that translate for them. The problem is that only one of them actually knows how to talk in period, and he's pretty shaky at it (he's a history buff/archaeologist), so for the most part, they can understand (reasonably — the translators aren't perfect) but not speak without sounding crazy.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: A translation spell may be provided in some tours, so the Tourists can easily understand the natives of Fantasyland.
• The Twelve Kingdoms: The Hinman act as this as a secondary function (their primary is giving the owner kick-ass martial art skills).
• The Ultimate Adventure (1939): Stephen realizes he can read the Arabic texts he comes across in the City of Brass just fine. It appears English to him, but he doesn't know for certain if it is actual English or if being in the legend makes Arabic as natural to him as English is in his own reality.
• Viceroy's Pride:
  • One of the standard runes across the Tellask Empire — and one of the few types of mind magic used on a regular basis — is a translator spell. Dan wears a helmet with the rune while on Twilight. When he loses it, the locals just offer to sell him a new one.
  • The nanites let Dan learn a new language over the course of a few days. They also come pre-loaded with most major Earth languages, which he appreciates when he happens to find himself breaking bread with some French soldiers.
• Virtuous Sons: A Greco-Roman Xianxia: One of the artifacts in the possession of the Raging Heaven cult is a shard of stone (possibly the Rosetta Stone), which appears to be inscribed with the founding myth of whoever reads it. Reading the stone grants the power to understand and be understood in all human languages.
• We Are Legion (We Are Bob): After Bob's first encounter with bizarre 2149 English, he starts running a translator at all times when talking to them.
• Unlike many Trapped in Another World works, Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf! averts this. The only reason Kazuhiro can communicate with other fantasy denizens in the other world is because he spent nearly 2 decades in that world and had time to learn various languages (along with taking a skill that lets him pick up langages faster). When he brought Marie to Japan, Marie is unable to communicate with other Japanese and has to be slowly taught Japanese by Kazuhiro.
• In the Xandri Corelel series, everyone uses translator implants, although they won't translate words that don't have Alliance Trade Common equivalents.
• Xanth: In the 3rd novel, the main character has the ability to make inanimate objects speak. He uses this ability to make friends with a 8-foot tall giant spider, by telling a piece of spider's web to translate the spider's chittering for him. A spider web speaking spider-language makes perfect sense. In a more general sense, any immigrants, once in the vicinity of the magic that permeates the land, can immediately understand every other person and they can understand him, no matter which original language they spoke. (It's similar to how people can understand each other when the Tardis is in the area.)
• Young Wizards: The wizards can use the Speech to make themselves understood by all beings (non-wizard listeners usually perceive it as being in their native tongue) and can understand every language. It's so effective that wizards can all speak to animals. At one point they speak to the air molecules and make it remember when it was solid like it was a billion years ago, so they can walk on it. And there's a rather hilarious Running Gag involving Kit's DVD player and remote control.

• In an episode of Andromeda, Harper has a massive database downloaded into his brain and starts speaking in various languages and suggests that someone make some kind of nanite that lets you speak any language. Some of those may be incomprehensible to the viewers, but are perfectly understood by at least some of the cast members. Dylan, being born on Tarn Vedra, would probably be fluent in Vedran. Rev Bem was also able to translate Harper's mis-quote "A fast swimmer keeps no pets" (Harper meant to say "A wise man knows his limitations") from Vedran.
• In one episode of The Dead Zone, Johnny briefly dies. He is amazed that he and the Native American ghost that he had been hanging around with can finally understand each other. The ghost explains that everyone sounds the same in the land of the dead.
• Doctor Who states that the TARDIS is psychic and provides translations directly into its passengers' minds. Given that the TARDIS is not only alive but sapient, inconsistencies can be chalked up to her own personal eccentricities and whims.
  • Some early episodes have the Doctor unable to communicate even in common Earth languages (even French). It's not made clear whether this is due to the TARDIS itself or to the Doctor learning more languages (both options have been used in-show).
  • A plot point in "The Masque of Mandragora"; companion Sarah Jane is revealed to be brainwashed when she questions why she understands medieval Italian. This example, along with examples in spin-off media, suggests that most of the time the TARDIS translation also subtly rewires the brain so that the companions don't consciously register that they shouldn't be able to understand what they're hearing.
  • Apparently, the TARDIS doesn't translate when another translator is in use. Case in point, Sil's translator in "Vengeance on Varos", which has a small glitch making him a Strange-Syntax Speaker.
  • When Rose finds out about the TARDIS' translation abilities in "The End of the World", she's initially a bit freaked out because, as she puts it, she's not happy that the Doctor didn't tell her that his spaceship "gets inside [her] brain" without permission.
  • This convenient plot device is actually woven into the story in "The Christmas Invasion", where the TARDIS universal translator suffers a Phlebotinum Breakdown due to the Doctor being unconscious. The protagonists have to resort to a "mundane" handheld translator to understand the Sycorax leader, and when he inexplicably switches to English, Rose realises the Doctor has recovered.
  • In "The Girl in the Fireplace", the Doctor is able to recognize that Reinette is not only speaking French, but pre-Revolutionary French.
  • A plot point in "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit", where the language is so incredibly old that it's untranslatable.
  • This is explored in "The Fires of Pompeii". When the Doctor tells Donna about the Translator Microbes' effect, she wonders what happens when they speak what they think is Latin. She goes up to a merchant, and says "veni vidi vici" to him. He says, emphasizing every word, "Me no a-speak Celtic! No can do, missy!" The Doctor explains that to the merchant, "you sound Welsh." Apparently speaking someone else's language translates back into your language (or what they think is your language anyway).
  • In "Smith and Jones" the Judoon "assimilate" other languages via a handheld electronic device. It records a few words of the target language, after which it functions as a two-way translator. According to the Sixth Doctor audio story "Judoon in Chains" Judoonese is "rather too basic" for the TARDIS to translate.
  • There are also the Hath, the bubble-blowing aliens in "The Doctor's Daughter". Lines were actually written for them, but the producers felt that neither voiceovers nor subtitles worked, so they left them untranslated to the audience. The other characters can clearly understand them, though.
  • The viewer occasionally isn't given the benefit of the TARDIS translation, as demonstrated in "The Stolen Earth", either for Rule of Funny (the Doctor speaking the Judoon language: "Flo! Bo! Jo! So!") or Rule of Drama (Daleks in Germany screaming "Exterminieren! Exterminieren!"). Though technically the TARDIS wasn't present for that last one and Word of God is that people who leave the TARDIS like Martha will eventually have the telepathic interface translation wear off.
  • The TARDIS also translates anything in a classical language (for example, the Classical Ood) into Latin.
  • "Vincent and the Doctor" has the TARDIS decide that speaking English with a Scottish accent and speaking French with a Dutch accent are translated equivalents.
  • Interestingly, the Doctor also seems to speak to horses, cats, and babies, but the TARDIS doesn't allow the companions to do so. It's unconfirmed whether this is a genuine skill or just the Doctor engaging in Confusion Fu. From "A Good Man Goes to War":
    The Doctor: I speak Baby.
    Amy: No, you don't.
    The Doctor: I speak everything.
  • In "Cold War", Clara assures the Russians in the nuclear submarine that she can't be a spy because she can't speak Russian. Of course, as far as they're concerned, she says this in perfect Russian. The Doctor probably shouldn't have skipped that part of her standard companion explanation.
  • Bill spends the first nine episodes of her time with the Doctor traveling to the future, the present, and periods in the past when Modern English existed, and so doesn't stop to think about the fact that everyone is speaking English. It's only in the tenth episode, "The Eaters of Light", that she meets a Roman soldier and realizes that the Doctor and/or the TARDIS have "some sort of telepathic field" that translates for everyone.
    Bill: [watching the Roman talk] Wow, it even does lip-synch.
  • In "The Ghost Monument", new companions Graham, Ryan and Yaz get injected with universal translators while in alien medical pods. The newly regenerated Thirteenth Doctor says that they won't be necessary when she gets the TARDIS back (she'd been separated from it after falling out due to regeneration-induced damage), which happens at the end of the episode.
  • In "The Time Warrior", on first meeting Irongron and his men, Commander Linx adjusts a device he is wearing on his belt and is then able to communicate with them, indicating is some sort of translation device.
• Farscape is the Trope Namer, using translator microbes which are capable of translating seemingly everything except cusswords and units of measurement.
  • In several episodes, this is used as a plot point, as D'Argo at one point starts a program in his ship that speaks in an archaic form of his own language. He can't understand it, and has to have the computer research the language and inject him with new microbes just so he can make out a few words. This also raises a big question on why anyone can understand Crichton, the first English speaker the wider galaxy has ever encountered, if the language has to be programmed in. The Grand Finale reveals the Sebaceans are descended from Transplanted Humans, so it's possible that whatever variant of Proto-Indo-European they spoke is enough of a baseline.
  • Another plot-relevant case is when the crew end up on Earth. All the aliens can understand the humans, but not vice versa. John has to serve as one-way interpreter.
  • There are three known languages besides ancient Luxan that can't be translated by the microbes: Pilot, Diagnosan, and at least one dialect of Scarran. The first two are too "dense" (as in a small bit of Pilot or Diagnosan speech conveys tremendous amounts of highly-technical information). Diagnosans are forced to rely on living translators, while Pilots have a dumbed down version of their language that does translate.
  • The inverse happens as well: Sikozu's race is incompatible with translator microbes, but fortunately, is able to learn languages extremely easily. Her first scene with Crichton involves him teaching her English (presumably, she's already learned most of the other species' languages). This comes in handy later when Moya arrives at Earth without Crichton, and Sikozu is able to establish communication with humans (who don't have translator microbes).
  • The rationalization for a universe full of aliens speaking Australian English is forgotten when convenient, such as when Crichton wants to impersonate a Peacekeeper by putting on an Evil Brit accent.
  • Then there's Klingon, which John knows and, like in Star Trek, is not translated.
  • Made irrelevant in some episodes, particularly one in the first season, when John ends up on a very Earth-like planet, which is undeveloped, and has never had contact with any alien race. Somehow, John is able to communicate freely, despite the natives having no translator microbes. In the end this is explained as them being descendants of colonists, who inherited them along with other useful microbes.
  • It also apparently doesn't translate written language. The same episode hinged on only Rygel being able to read a book written in an archaic language from his own world, which he had studied as a child but hadn't used in decades. John also has to teach Aeryn how to read English even after she learns to speak it.
• The Good Place: The Good Place automatically translates all languages into whatever the speaker is most comfortable with. Funnily enough, it's not actually necessary; Eleanor, Jason, and Tahani all speak English, and while Chidi prefers French he is perfectly fluent in English.
• In Legends of Tomorrow, when traveling to the USSR in 1986, Rip gives everyone electronic pills that, when swallowed, attach to the nervous system and allow one to speak the language currently set by Gideon. Interestingly, the person speak thinks he's speaking English until he hears the words coming out of his mouth. Presumably, the chip in the pill intercepts the brainwaves associated with speech and sends out different signals to the muscles. Also presumably, the pills translate foreign speech into English for them. Naturally, Translation Convention is in play.
• In an episode of Lost, Hurley gets the ability to hear what Jin, the Korean, is saying. Although this turns out to be just a dream.
• Magic Grandad was a British children's Edutainment Show about a wizard who would take his grandchildren back in time to learn about history. One episode has them meeting Louis Braille, and Grandad must cast an additional spell (sung to the tune of "Frère Jacques") so they will hear the French characters speaking to them in English, and the French characters in turn will think they are being spoken to in French.
• The Orville: In "Sympathy for the Devil", Otto speaks German, naturally. The ship's "translation matrix" instantly translates it for the crew of The Orville.
• In the future of Other Space, Tina uses these to translate her native Russian into English. It's implied that while multiple languages still exist, translators are used by entire countries to get everyone to speak English.
• Red Dwarf: Starbug has a Universal Translator that allows them to broadcast messages in all languages (including Welsh) and interpret GELF warnings. It's also used to communicate with the titular sapient virus in "Epideme".
• Stargate-verse:
  • Stargate SG-1 uses Daniel Jackson, an expert linguist. The movie upon which the series is based hinges entirely on Jackson's linguistic skills, both to interpret the "operating manual" of the Stargate and to communicate with the people on the other side. In the first season, his skills are used on and off to talk to natives, but this is quickly forgotten (since it would make for clumsy storytelling if everyone else had to use Jackson to translate). As the series progresses, his expertise is used primarily to access Imported Alien Phlebotinum, as the inhabitants of at least three galaxies appear to have mastered the language of the "Tau'ri" independently (see Aliens Speaking English). One explanation (not shown on-screen, but offered by the show creators in one of the "behind the scenes" documentaries) is that the Stargates actually insert some sort of nanite into travelers that allows universal translation. You'd think that would show up on medical scans, though.
    • The tie-in novel Survival of the Fittest (intended to depict SG-1's first mission together) included the discovery that the Stargate includes a program to allow for automatic translation of most standard languages, with Sam Carter making a note to add this detail to the systems back in Stargate Command,
  • The original released information for Stargate Atlantis months before the show premiered mentioned that translator devices were among the technology the team would find in Atlantis. This was never seen in the aired pilot, however.
• Star Trek uses a Universal Translator. Amazingly, it works even if the Federation has never seen nor encountered the aliens or their language before (apparently, by analyzing its grammar and vocabulary). Oddly, it seems that the universal translator switches itself on and off when someone is speaking Klingon, probably to give the writers a chance to show off a real live alien language.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • The show establishes that the translators work directly from thought patterns. It also explicitly establishes that it can detect what gender an organism is, even if that organism is a bodiless cloud of energy. Both of these concepts were completely ignored after the episode in which they were introduced.
    • In the original series, it has long been implied that Chekov already spoke English in addition to his native Russian, but it's never confirmed one way or the other. It would explain why he speaks with an accent when translated languages usually don't.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Subverted in "The Ensigns of Command" with the Sheliak, a race of vaguely octopus-like non-humanoids whose minds are so alien that the the universal translator can't find enough reference points to work with. The Sheliak had already learned English themselves in order to negotiate a border treaty with the Federation, but consider human language so imprecise that the treaty they insist on stretches over several thousand pages.
    • Deconstructed with the Tamarians in "Darmok" — despite the translator working normally, the resulting speech is still incomprehensible because it's based entirely on cultural metaphors that the Enterprise crew have no knowledge of.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • Subverted in one episode when a new species comes to the station and their language is so different that the universal translator has to spend about half of the episode to figure it out — but then again, it manages to figure it out despite the fact that they repeat the same sentence a hundred times.
    • In "Little Green Men", the Ferengi characters Quark, Rom and Nog crash-land in Earth's past, and due to an unfortunately timed malfunction, they're unable to speak or understand English for a brief period. Their mouths still make English words. Incidentally, their translators are installed in their ears.
    • In another instance, a character listening to a recording of Weyoun negotiating a ceasefire with a Federation representative turns the translator off, allowing him to hear what Weyoun actually said in his native language and pick up on a critical nuance the translator missed (a grammar difference with no equivalent in English).
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • The crew acquires the quantum slipstream drive, which is superior to warp drive, from an alien whose entire species are living universal translators, in his own words. He's not lying, but he is lying about a message the crew has been trying to translate, insisting that it is impossible due to corrupted data
    • "The 37's" hangs a lampshade on the convention, by having a cryogenically frozen guy who can only speak Japanese marvel at how the Americans he's frozen with are somehow speaking Japanese, while the Americans equally marvel that he's speaking English. This turns into a brief debate about who's speaking what language, until Janeway interrupts to explain how the universal translator works.
    • Another episode features an alien whose language is so out-there (bordering on Black Speech) that the universal translator can't handle it, forcing Harry Kim to work on the problem for the better part of the episode.
    • Another episode centers around the attempt to communicate with an Insectoid Alien, which fails because said insectoid is merely the life support system of a non-cellular, mostly liquid, cytoplasmic-like organism that communicates and controls its starship through biological secretions.
    • In "Think Tank", the titular group of aliens need their own version of a translator to communicator to work together. With it, they're so intelligent they're all but unstoppable; sabotage it and they're just a bunch of arrogant pricks that can't talk to each other.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise has several instances where their more primitive universal translators need some time and calibration (sometimes by a professional linguist such as the Enterprise NX-01's communications officer Hoshi Sato) to figure out a new language.
  • Star Trek: Discovery
    • "An Obol for Charon" sees the translator malfunction, randomly translating everyone's speech into various human and alien languages, and the ensuing chaos demonstrates how much the ship's diverse crew relies on it. Fortunately Saru is a hyperpolyglot and proves an adequate temporary replacement.
    • Species 10-C do not communicate verbally, but rather through a combination of Pheromones and Psychic Powers, combined with their very limited concept of individuality, leads to Federation officials and Starfleet officers making first contact to stumble through symbolic arrangements to convey the universal language of mathematics, and then work on from there. After some miscommunication due to one bad actor, a Vulcan just brute-forces the process with a mind meld, finally teaching 10-C they're dealing with a more diverse and more individualistic society.
• Star Wars:
  • Mok Shaiz from The Book of Boba Fett is similar to the Star Trek Beyond example — you hear his alien gurgling and a computerised voice speaking English a split second later. He's better than most Star Wars examples where at best there'll be a Translator Buddy robot repeating everything. This is also a carryover from the animated shows, which introduced Ithorians — Mok Shaiz's species — wearing similar translation devices.
  • In the third season of The Mandalorian, IG-11 gets converted into Mobile-Suit Human armour for Grogu that lets him say "yes" and "no".
• In Time Bandits (2024), the Bandits all wear translation helmets that allow them to understand anything said to them in any language in any era and to speak back fluently in the same language.
• In The Tomorrow People (1973), homo superior use their telepathy to translate what aliens are saying into English. In one spin-off novel, they ask a lost alien the name of his home planet ... and discover that with no other context to base it on, the telepathic translation renders the word meaning "my home planet" into the English word meaning "my home planet" — Earth.
• In the 1980s Australian science show Towards 2000, an episode about translator software has a skit in which three businessmen from England, Saudi Arabia and Italy (all played by the host) try to negotiate an international deal but get confused by the overly literal translation of what they're saying. Eventually, the computer blows up when called upon to translate the most incomprehensible language in the world.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "People Are Alike All Over", Sam Conrad believes that the Martians are speaking English, but he is told that he is speaking their language as a result of unconscious transference, a type of hypnosis.

• The Bible: Sometime after Jesus ascends to Heaven, the Disciples are blessed so that when they speak, everyone hears it in their own language, allowing them to spread Jesus' teachings around the world. It's strongly implied that each disciple is speaking a different language and is able to switch languages when necessary, so the miracle is that they are able to speak different languages, not that everyone hears a different language. However, the text emphasises the astonishment of the listeners at being able to understand what is being said, so there is some ambiguity as to the meaning at least in the English translation.

• Su-Say and Yih from The Books of Thoth episode “Welcome to the Xenarium” are both physically incapable of speaking human languages. They use Series 11 Chiang-Le Guin Universal Translation Units to render their speech intelligible to humans. This only applies to speaking, however. They’re both perfectly capable of understanding human languages without assistance.
• In Season 7 of the Red Panda Adventures, the eponymous hero subconsciously projects a hypnotic field that makes everyone nearby understand each other. Of course, being an auditory medium and taking place in Europe, this is necessary. As he is suffering from amnesia, he has a bad case of Centipede's Dilemma regarding this power. Played with in that as prisoners as war, the fact that the Germans think they are speaking German is unexpected, and the heroes can't discuss plans within earshot of the German guards.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy introduced its parodic "Babel Fish" in its original radio version. See under Literature, above, for details.
• Journey into Space: In The Return from Mars, Cassia gives Jet, Lemmy, Doc and Mitch necklaces that read their thoughts and translates her language into English and vice versa.

• In Academy of Merlin, the only reason the students can understand each other is because of a massive sphere of influence known as the language debarrier, which stretches over most of the forest, Justus, and the Academy. It translates others' languages into the hearer's native tongue, with the exception of nonhuman languages.
• City of Lost Characters, based on a similar Massive Multiplayer Crossover premise as its predecessor The Massive Multi Fandom RPG, likewise has all the characters able to understand each other perfectly as part of the City's unusual nature.
• In A Facility, a chip is implanted in everyone's brains that allows them to understand each other.
• In Holy Relic, everyone comes in with an earpiece enabling them to hear everyone and everything else in their native tongue.
• In The Massive Multi-Fandom RPG, everyone in the City can understand each other perfectly. This is due to everyone coming from all over the multiverse. Per Word of God, this gives everyone the ability to understand all other languages, but doesn't actually change what speech or writing sounds/looks like.
• Player characters in Roll To Dodge: Savral have an innate trait that translates non-player-character dialogue into English, given that the player characters can communicate with Savral's inhabitants, who speak in a variety of different tongues and languages. This creates a few interesting situations.
  • When one of the players, Brah, switches from speaking to a group of Keranian Humans to negotiate with a group of Imari Shades, the humans make note of the sudden language swap.
  • In another instance, Kayne asks the lich Enri to teach him some of the orc languages while visiting his pyramid in the desert. When Enri tries explaining the fundamentals of Ixali while translating a few words, Kayne hears everything in English, even though the Ixali script bears little similarity to the English language.
• The crew for Stacy in Trans 9 is able to understand one another through a ship-based translating system regardless of language or species. This also happens to work while on different planets. However, the translation can be overridden by some natural foreign phrases and undisclosed curses.

• According to Word of God, all the Matoran Universe characters in BIONICLE were hit with a signal from Mata Nui, which upgraded them with software that allowed them to communicate with the Glatorian and Agori.

• Ars Magica: Under Spell Construction rules, a combination of Intellego ("I Perceive") and Mentem ("the Mind") magic lets the mage understand all spoken communication within earshot. Because it picks up the thoughts behind the words, it also translates slang and misuse of a common language.
• Chronicles of Darkness:
  • Demon: The Descent: Unchained have native-level fluency in any language that currently has native speakers — anything from English to Ainu. This includes the First Tongue (the language of Spirits), but leaves out dead languages like Sumerian, Latin and High Speech.
  • Geist: The Sin-Eaters: Sin-Eaters bypass the language barrier entirely when they speak with ghosts, courtesy of the Geists that bond to their souls and fuel their powers.
  • Mage: The Awakening: the 3-dot Mind spell "Universal Language" lets its subject understand and translate any language, broadly construed, with the exception of not letting Sleepers understand High Speech.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The spell comprehend languages lets the target understand any language for a short time, while the more powerful tongues also lets them speak any language.
  • Pearls of Speech allow their wearer to understand and speak a specific language. In lore, they were originally produced for Drow slavers who thought it beneath them to learn their slaves' tongue the old-fashioned way.
  • The Monk Class feature "Tongue of the Sun and Moon" turns a monk into an Omniglot, giving them the ability to understand, and be understood by, anyone who speaks a language.
  • The Eberron setting has docents, a sentient magical device that can be implanted into a warforged, which starts off knowing several languages and can learn new ones by being exposed to them.
• In Eclipse Phase, most characters have Muses — A.I.s in their brain implants that assist with social networking, including running basic translation programs. It's not uncommon for everyone in the party to speak a different language. There's also a specific device for translating dolphin.
• The Deckbuilding Game Eminent Domain features the "Rosetta Fish", which in-universe translates alien languages, a direct homage to the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In game terms, it lets you use the otherwise-useless alien icons on your cards to boost your actions.
• In the Hollow Earth Expedition supplement Secrets of the Surface World, when the Atlantean language is spoken properly, it can be understood by any sapient being that hears it as though it had been spoken in their native tongue. In other words, it's a language that translates itself.
• Rolemaster: The old Spacemaster time travel supplement weaves some deft pseudo-linguistic gobbledegook around this trope by introducing a language called "Intrinsic" that can be understood by any human being and that can be easily learned.
• In Traveller, one of the programs one can use with a wafer jack is a translator.
• The Tau in Warhammer 40,000 have cybernetic implants in their brains that allow them to communicate with other races, including humans. It's good enough to get the gist, but understanding or conveying any kind of subtlety still requires training. So far they're the only race known to use a universal translator, at least on a large scale, seeing as how most factions in the setting aren't particularly interested in communicating with aliens. In addition, the Tau Water Caste have a genetic disposition to translation and communication. Given enough time, they can not only translate almost anything, but also naturalize themselves with body language and accents to make themselves as friendly as possible.

• Assassin's Creed: A majority of the dialogue takes place in genetic memories being relived by the protagonist, Desmond, but the Animus renders all of the Arabic, Italian, etc. into understandable English for him (and the player). The frequent lapses into Gratuitous Foreign Language are explained as 'malfunctions', although the Animus does seem to skip over most examples of swearing, leaving it untranslated in the audio (although having subtitles on will provide a translation in parentheses). Made funnier with Caterina Sforza taunting her children's kidnappers. It gets more obscene as she builds up steam, and eventually, even the Animus (and the subtitles) throws its metaphorical hands up and stops translating. The tone gets her point across. At one point his kidnappers say that they could revert everything back to period appropriate dialects, but that it wouldn't do you much good unless Desmond had "read Chaucer".
  Desmond: Chauncy who?
• Conquest: Frontier Wars mentions a translator to begin with but ignores it later. The Calareons are smart enough to not need one but the Mantis occasionally speak in the wrong order.
• In Crymachina, all of the human characters are speaking their native tongues, German for Leben and Japanese for Mikoto and Ami. Their leader, the AI Enoa, handles all translation, making everyone hear their preferred language. Leben initially compliments the others on their perfect German before she learns the truth.
• In Cyberpunk 2077, V is mentioned to have a translator implant. When characters speak in non-English languages, the subtitles will show the speech in its original language before changing the text to English in real-time. There is also a segment where V encounters a relatively rare language (Haitian Creole) and needs to download a language pack to understand what is being spoken.
• In Divinity: Original Sin II, several inscriptions of the Eternal language communicate their meaning to the mind of anyone who tries to read them.
• In Excelsior Phase One Lysandia, you need to obtain the Miracle Ear to speak to the inhabitants of the Monster Town Grethal.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, those who possess the power of the Echo may possess the ability to understand, and speak in, any and all languages. This becomes key to dealing with the beast tribes, as their language structures are radically different from that of the "spoken" races.
• FreeSpace:
  • In Descent: FreeSpace, an alien race speaks in incomprehensible grunts overlapped by a speech synthetizer's monotone that is roughly half a second behind. In a game heavy with verisimilitude, this turns out to work better than almost any kind of alien-spoken English would — particularly since the obligatory Returning Destroyers (the Shivans) are the one inscrutable mystery race in scifi games to stay inscrutable, and never speak at all.
  • The game's files on the Vasudan people teases the player by saying that these "incomprehensible grunts" are in fact a language more complex and sophisticated than any on Earth, to the point that even if humans could decipher individual words, it would probably still be incomprehensible. In fact, one of the main triggers for the Terran-Vasudan war was a Terran diplomat mishandling the Vasudan language (presumably the translation devices were not as sophisticated as they'd later become).
  • FreeSpace 2:
    • The NTF rebellion turned out to be a cover for the revival of a top-secret project to create a Shivan communications translator. Although the GTVA managed to obtain the technology just before the ship containing the prototype was destroyed, we never get to know what happened to the technology or the rogue Admiral who went on-board the Shivan transport. With the game's publisher bankrupt, and the space-sim genre practically dead, we never will know.
    • Parodied in the joke campaign "Deus Ex Machina". As an NTF pilot, you are able to witness the top-secret ETAK translator device in action for the first time. Unfortunately, the translator outputs everything in L337-sp34k. It turns out the Shivans thought Terrans and Vasudans communicated via "h07 Pl4s|\/|4" (hot plasma). Apparently when the Shivans first appeared, they witnessed the Terran-Vasudan war, and they thought Terrans and Vasudans firing hot balls of plasma at each other was the two species communicating - which explains (sort of) why the Shivans appeared to be hostile even if they "C4|\/|3 1|\| p34C3" (came in peace) all along. Neither the device's operator nor Alpha 1 are able to decipher the translated l337 text, and if the player failed to plot an escape path, the Shivans will resort to using the "known way of communication".
• Interspecies diplomacy in Galactic Civilizations is pretty pointless ("greeble sig doob?") until you research or trade for Universal Translators. You can even build an improved version, Diplomatic Translators, that translates for you and suggests the best way to phrase your demands or responses, granting you a bonus to your Diplomacy rating.
• You have these installed in your brain in Gene Troopers, as seen when you converse with other alien races. While some aliens understand English, most of them tends to speak in unintelligible alien gibberish where the dialogue would be in bracketed subtitles.
• In Halo, both the UNSC and the Covenant make liberal use of translation software.
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved, the Grunts' speech is translated, but the Elites are mostly unintelligible. In Halo 2, the Elites are finally heard in English due to more advanced UNSC translators. The Covenant, however, are also heard speaking English to each other when there are no humans around, which is obviously Translation Convention.
  • To complicate things, the Halo Wars bonus material timeline reveals that the Covenant was ordered by the Prophets to form "Language Groups" who would learn human language and teach it to everyone, presumably to help with military intelligence.
• Shows up in Hey You, Pikachu! as a gameplay mechanic - the player's handed a device called a PokeHelper that translates human language into something a wild Pikachu understands.
• High on Life: The game starts with your stolen living alien gun spitting these onto you so that you can understand him and all other aliens in the game. Said microbes are also highly contagious, allowing everyone to understand each other within a few minutes of exposure. These translators are especially effective, being able to translate not only expressions and idioms but even translate alien celebrities and media into their Earth counterparts, allowing aliens to make pop-culture references. They explicitly state that you are hearing a different name and quote than the one they are saying, but the translator is able to cover it so that you get the same idea.
• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984), you have to figure out how to get a Babel Fish into your ear before you can understand the Vogon announcement coming over the PA system, which is otherwise just shown as gibberish.
• In Honkai: Star Rail, the ability of people to communicate with each other regardless of species or planet of origin is possible because of the IPC's Synesthesia Beacon technology. Humorously, the foul-mouthed Boothill has a malfunction in his beacon that translates all his cursing into Gosh Dang It to Heck!.
• In Iji, the protagonist's nanofield allows understanding and speaking in the language of both alien species. It's also parodied with an item that messes up the conversation and speech.
• While the first two games in The Journeyman Project series don't have you interact with people, the third game has you try out a "chameleon suit", a time-traveling suit that allows you to scan a person and project him or her using holo-projectors. Speech is likewise translated in real-time and using the appropriate voices. After all, how else is your character supposed to talk to Atlanteans (who probably speak something similar to Ancient Greek), Ancient Egyptians, Mayans, Tibetans, and Mongolians? The second game also includes a Translator Biochip that lets you read and hear various languages.
• The HK-series droids in Knights of the Old Republic are hybrid assassin and protocol (C-3PO) droids, meaning they're programmed with every known language in the galaxy. The Player Character is an omniglot thanks to the Force but requires the aid of HK-47 to converse with the Tusken Raiders due to their unconventional language.
• In The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Link has to eat a Jabber Nut in order to understand the language of the Minish People. It also lets him understand animals in Minish form.
• In Little Big Adventure II, you eventually pick up a translator device that allows you to understand the aliens.
• In The Longest Journey, April listens to somebody speaking Alltongue for a few minutes, and her brain appears to learn to "translate" the language, so she hears the speaker as if they were talking in plain English. This is a characteristic of Alltongue itself. Anyone who listens to it for a while will be able to understand it. Indeed, that's why it's called Alltongue. This effect only works in Arcadia, however; in Stark, where there is no magic, it's just another foreign language.
• Mass Effect:
  • The series offers up two explanations:
    • The first is that there is a galactic trade language, in order to make politics and commerce easier. It sounds like English, but that's purely Translation Convention, as at the end a Prothean hologram is played, only the player (who got exposed to two Prothean beacons as well as the Prothean Cipher to make the beacons understandable) can understand it. We hear as perfect English, albeit with static, but your party acts like it's incomprehensible gibberish, aside from Liara (who helped the player understand Prothean in the first place and has been studying them for decades) and she only understands brief fragments of the conversation.
    • The second explanation plays this trope straight. Most will speak the galactic trade language, but there are those who can't or simply choose not to. For them, there is this trope, detailed in the downloadable content and in the second book. Translation synthesizers translate most foreign languages into whatever language the user programs it to. It uses the extranet to pull in any new dialects, and can be in almost any form, from jewelry to PDAs. In the book it is shown to malfunction at times, as it was never built to translate multiple languages all at the same time, and if a an alien is injured and/or insane, the translator has trouble translating the garbled speech. The languages have to be decoded by linguists before the machines will work, it is NOT a universal translator like from Star Trek.
  • While it's mostly restricted to background fluff, translation issues are occasionally brought up during dialogue:
    • In some areas like the Citadel, background noise will include voice clips of untranslated alien dialogue (presumably because they're too far away/out of focus for Shepard's translator to bother). You most likely wouldn't actually know this unless you looked at the game files, where the .wav files are identified by the alien who's supposed to be speaking them. Turns out turians sound like squawking birds. Krogan sound a like Elites from Halo. The salarians' language has clicking in it. Volus sounds like Huttese from Star Wars.
    • If female Commander Shepard romances Thane Krios, he will use a word that Shepard's translator is unable to understand, saying her "translator just glitched."
    • Certain alien slurs like Tali's 'bosh'tet' go untranslated, probably because there's no English equivalent or, alternately, that a direct English translation would not carry the same implications as to a quarian. Some specific idiomatic phrases don't translate well either: "There's still a, how do you humans say it, fly in the lotion?" Also, when Garrus attempts to woo female Shepard, he tells her that turian pick-up lines probably don't translate very well. He tries one anyway and ends up telling her that her "waist is very supportive".
    • In Mass Effect 3 Tali finally explains the meaning of the Quarian phrase, "Keelah Se'lai", which so far has gone unexplained. Tali explains that it really doesn't have an exact translation in English, but roughly speaking, it means "By the homeworld I wish to see someday".
    • The asari, being an all-female race, occasionally cause some issues from terms that almost-but-not-quite translate. Most prominently the parent who doesn't give birth is always called the 'father' regardless of their race or gender.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda, taking place in an entirely different galaxy, features two alien races (the kett and the angarans) whose languages need to be decoded before the translators are fully functional, and even then there's more translation flubs present in the dialogue than in previous games. It's aided by SAM, an AI who builds the translation codex on the fly by sampling dialogue and writing, and in the case of the angarans, it's mentioned they've had some limited contact with Milky Way species before the Initiative makes contact with them (namely, Exiles from the Initiative) so they've had a bit of a head start on translating.
• In the Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force universe, by installing a language program into their device, any language a person heard is translated to their native language and to another when spoken.
• In Nioh, William is granted the ability to speak and understand Japanese by the Nekomata Guardian Spirit. As such, all the Japanese characters understand him despite him speaking solely in English (considered Translation Convention).
• Downplayed in No Man's Sky, as in order to converse with aliens you have to perform immense amounts of Stat Grinding to learn their languages by traveling the universe finding translations for each individual word in each of the five languages. You can install "translator modules" in your suit, but they're essentially worthless as they only translate a few words per sentence and still leave you to do 90% of the work.
• In Onimusha 3: Demon Siege, Ako, the tengu, has the power to make everyone in range of her understand each others' languages. This is why Jacques, Michelle, and Henri, who all speak French, can understand Samanosuke, who is from ancient Japan. When she disappears to travel through time, they become unable to understand each other again.
• Phantasy Star Online featured a special dialogue selection system that allowed players to construct simple sentences that would be broadcast to other players in a lobby or party in each player's native language. The beta trailer proudly announces this feature:
  Relax now, worry not. Language barriers have broken down entirely! You can even build a common front in realtime with players on the other side of the Earth twenty-thousand kilometers away!
• In Quake IV, while riding the Conveyor Belt o' Doom on his way to being turned into one of the bad guys, the player character gets injected in the head, and a monitor overhead which had been displaying incomprehensible gibberish turns into English. Similarly, after that the overhead announcements and threats of the Strogg become garbled English.
• Rain World: Since the playable characters are slugcats (animals that evolved after the era of the Benefactors), they cannot understand their language. That's where the Mark of Communication comes in; Iterators can essentially modify the brains of the living beings that enter their chamber to understand the ancient language. This mark manifests as a glowing white pixel above the slugcat's head when they're standing still. It also reflects on the gameplay; if you visit Looks to the Moon or Five Pebbles prior to receiving the mark, you'll hear their incomprehensible Voice Grunting, which is replaced by text after receiving it. Similarly, you'll only be able to hear what Echoes say after getting the mark.
• Reunion (1994) has a "universal communicator". It is invented mere hours after you encounter aliens^note Because of the way triggers are set, you only get it after your sloop meets Jaanosians on their home planet Jade. Carrier ships and other alien races won't work. and is very easy to research. It looks like a wristwatch.
• Screamer (2026) explains how everybody can easily understand each other despite speaking in each character's native language^note e.g. Hiroshi Jackson speaks English to Frederic Barthelemy, who speaks French/ that bypasses the Language Barrier. As such, it's explained that every human being has a Universal Translator device implanted into their temples. Even Gage goes further in allowing him to communicate and understand with his pet dog Fermi.
• In SD Snatcher, a "Lingu-Disk" to translate Spanish lets Gillian speak with Mr. Cielo.
• Played with in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. The Demon Summoning Program installed on the protagonist's Powered Armor will translate what demons are saying, but only after you've defeated them at least once. Until then, you can't even see them; they look like balls of static. All throughout the game, demons will regularly ask how you can understand them.
• In Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter, ridiculously awful janitor Roger Wilco can't naturally understand anyone. However, early in the game, he gets an item called the Strange Gizmo. Turning it on (which requires a bit of inventive thinking) allows him to understand any alien speech. In Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge, he still carries the same device, only this time, it's called the Dialect Translator and cannot be turned off. It's only useful once in that game, while The Sarien Encounter requires it to be on for the entire game.
• Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters:
  • The game is semi-famous for its amusing subversion of this trope, which also makes the race rather scary upon further viewing: the ship's computer is unable to fully translate the language of the Orz, leaving the player to puzzle out bizarre, vaguely Engrish-sounding sentences such as
    "Hello to our *house*. Do you feel *better* yet?
    If you are *campers* you will enjoy *the change*, but maybe not yet.
    It is best if many happy Orz are coming to your *house*."
  • Earthlings managed to make an entire race their enemies by thinking that translators didn't work. On the first meeting. Said race is the VUX. The Earthling captain told his assistant that VUX must stand for "Very Ugly Xenomorph." Which, unfortunately, was clearly broadcasted and translated to the VUX ship. Way to go, humans.^note While the Insult was spoken, it was just a convenient excuse to avoid having anything to do with those hideous Earthlings.
  • The translators apparently get tripped up by idiomatic speech to some extent. Fwiffo has some difficulty translating "the backbone of the Earthguard" because of this, instead first saying "the most rigid crest".
  • The Ur-Quan have their own solution in the form of their Talking Pets. The Pets are animals with psychic capabilities, and if two people speaking different languages are interacting, the Pet automatically acts the part of an interpreter. Very convenient. The Talking Pets are actually an intelligent species, the Dnyarri, who have been genetically altered to remove their higher brain functions. The Ur-Quan really, really hate them (for good reason), thus why they use them like this; they consider interpreting the words of "lesser species" to be the most humiliating and demeaning task in existence.
• In Star Fox Adventures, all of the characters sans the Star Fox team speak dinosaur language (even Krystal, who hails from a different planet than everybody else). They're subtitled for our convenience in the prologue, and subtitled by Slippy for a while afterward until he finishes a translation device so Fox (and the viewers) can hear them speak in English.
• In Star Ocean, advanced species have universal Translator devices (that when necessary can double as EXPLOSIVES). They understand the people who aren't yet inducted to the Pangalactic Federation/Terran Alliance because they've documented and recorded them behind the scenes (read: from orbit). As such, they can speak to anyone (there are no unknown groups in the galaxy) except the Aldians, who are already space-capable and wholesomely unfriendly until their entire species is blown up in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time.
• Starship Titanic makes a passing reference to "autotranslators", but no further explanation is given. Possibly it has to do with the player's Personal Electronic Thing. The tie-in novel explains that the ship's systems rearranges its passengers' brainwaves so that everyone speaks Blerontinian language while on-board, and the human characters use "Translatorspecs" to read signs around the ship.
• In Stellaris, encountering another starfaring polity's ships, stations or colonies prompts a special research project to figure out their language enough to hail them. Being the first to initiate communications grants a bit of bonus Influence, though if you procrastinate the other species might do the work for you and contact you. You can also trade "Communications" with other nations, which will reveal and allow you to interact with every race they've encountered. However, there's one AI personality type that is utterly disinterested in diplomatic relations — Fanatical Purifiers. ("Our reports suggest that you have developed translators to understand alien languages. We haven't.") Deconstructed in some aspects — for instance, insecure devices can be hacked, so if a Playful Hacker hacks the translator of a diplomatic envoy to turn magnanimous platitudes into xeno-slurs, the results are either great comedy fodder (if the nation the envoy was sent to takes it with good humor) or a minor diplomatic incident.
• All the aliens in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation use translation devices, though they are pointedly not perfect. When one guy tells the alien his name (which means 'Mysterious Gourment' in German) one of the alien commanders incredulously asks if his translator is broken. Also, in a fourth-wall breaking moment, another guy begins his normal battlespeech, which segues into an episode splash-screen. After this, the same alien commander just has to ask "... 'Chapter 30'? What the hell?" Arguably, that makes them working too perfectly. "Mysterious Gourmet" really is the English translation for that character's "name". The fact that it was able to translate a German phrase when they're most likely speaking Japanese or English shows that whoever made that really did their homework.
• Parodied in Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan. When Sydney first enters the temple, whenever he tries talking to locals, he can't understand their language. They start speaking English after Sydney gets the Shell Of Wisdom, and Sydney assumes that the shell is working. The Mayan near the entrance to the temple of Chichen Itza, however, reveals that the shell is just a regular old shell, the Mayans can speak perfect English, and they just like to mess with outsiders.
• In Tales of Eternia, Meredy and the Celestians speak the Melnics language, which can be understood by the Inferians only by wearing "Orz Earrings"; these use some sort of psychic Technobabble to send the actual desired words into the recipient's brain, and require the users to be on similar "psychic wavelengths". Interestingly, Meredy (or the psychic equivalent of her voice) speaks in pidgin English for the entire game; whereas when the Inferians actually reach Celestia, all the other Celestians speak with no accent at all, and the requirement of being on the same "wavelength" is, ironically, waived. None of this is ever explained.
• One of the odder examples is Tomba!. The titular character has to bite elves to understand their language, and gains a bit better grasp of it with each one he does. It takes 4 to get a full grasp of the language.
• Unreal I has the 'Universal Translator,' a small computer like device that translates alien script, but not alien speech.
• In Voyage: Inspired by Jules Verne, in order to be able to speak the Selenites' language, Michel Ardan needs to use a specialized flute.
• It's a plot point in Xenoblade Chronicles X, where Elma finds it odd that the aliens on Mira are speaking English, it turns out that everyone is speaking their native tongues, and something on the planet is doing the translating for them. The exception is L, who learned English from a Data Pad he found from some of the White Whale's wreckage, and is trying to speak English, littered with various ESL flubs. That it was Elma who noticed this is another clue that she's an alien who's been living on Earth for 30 years, she would've learned English either before or during her time there.

• Ace in Space: Enby is given a communications bracelet that can translate various languages. This comes up the most often with Pierre, a fellow Earthling who was raised in Montreal and mainly speaks French.
• Fate/stay night: The Holy Grail acts as one. For the Servants, it implants a basic level of knowledge about the time period into which they are summoned. This prevents inconveniences such as, for example, a Servant from Ancient Greece being freaked out by cars or cellphones — pretty convenient, considering that a Servant can come from across time and from any culture around the globe.
• Serre: The Empire issued Oaxa a translator to ensure that she could communicate effectively with the people she is conquering. When she turns it off, Arlette hears her telepathy as a pleasant hum in her mind. Oaxa also finds Arlette’s untranslated voice enchanting.

• In the AstroLOLogy episode "Com-meow-nication", Aquarius invents a handheld device that lets him learn what cats are saying. The cat has to simply meow into the device, and it creates a picture to represent what the cat wants.
• Deep Space Discounts: The wristbands the workers use act as these, translating everything (except for profanity) into the wearer's native tongue.

• 70-Seas has "Babel Finches" that can translate between two languages. The side comic Tossa Roto also has a larger "Babel bird" named Pally that can learn new languages on the fly.
• Myan's collar from Cat Nine. Not only will it allow her to transform into various animals, it also allows her to speak like a human, whatever form she is at the moment. Removing the collar takes away its effects.
• In Catharsis, while in the Land under the Chair, Jen, Baxter, and Rremly all get infant dust bunnies shoved in their ears so they can understand the fluff language.
• In Traci Spencer's Compass, the dimension-hopping employees of TDC are given translator implants. See these pages.
• Deverish Also has the dialect-indoctrination spell. Unusually, it's not perfect; you can only use one language at a time, can only learn a new one this way by finding a mage who speaks it, and if they mess up it can leave you unable to use your original languages until a more competent mage fixes the problem.
• Down to Earth uses the classic 'transmit fluency through touch'. Zaida elaborates after instantly learning English that her species' telepathy powers also play a role in it.
• In The Dragon Doctors, there's a world-wide magical spell called "The Language Barrier Breaker" in effect at all times, which comes in handy when a girl who's been petrified for 2000 years is restored to life.
• The titular planet in Earthsong (Crystal Yates) provides a psychic translator microbe field which allows anyone on the planet to understand anyone else, speaking or writing. Writing remains in the original language however, and once no one's left who understands the language concerned, it reverts to incomprehensibility until it can be laboriously deciphered.
• In El Goonish Shive, the Uryuoms (but not the chimerae, according to Word of God) have the ability to instantly learn any language by rubbing the knobs of their antennae against the head of someone who speaks it, or teach a language which they know to others in the same fashion.
• The End (2010) features projection translators, which are capable of translating spoken languages into universal psychic impulses. However, it only translates languages that are in its database, so while the human characters can use them to understand various aliens, the aliens won't understand them in turn.
• Magic generally accomplishes this fairly seamlessly in Errant Story, which of course doesn't keep Jon from hamming it up when he and the usual suspects visit Tsuirakushiti.
• Grrl Power: Aliens often use translator devices, though after the Masquerade is broken and alien tourists start arriving on Earth in the open it becomes very easy to tell which ones aren't using them in an attempt to seem more "authentic". Cora upgrades Sydney's glasses with a Heads-Up Display that includes a translator function which is shown as subtitles, and has the advantage of working on text as well as spoken languages, but has trouble parsing French.
• The alien Nemesites in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! use a translator earplug that goes in one ear. Being friends with their princess, Bob owns one.
• Parodied in this page of Intragalactic with the translator macrobe: A painfully large, jagged metal machine that must be jammed into the brain through the eye socket. "Hope you aren't allergic to tetanus!" The translator macrobe veel tranzlate everisink you sai viz a bad Russian aksent.
• Kila Ilo has translator implants. One of the main characters refuses to have one, on the basis that brain surgery is necessary for the implant.
• Killroy And Tina has Universpeak, an "empathic language" that allows communication with all lifeforms, even aliens and animals, when aided by a Neural Enhancer.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Blue devil liquor grants the drinker the devils' power of tongues for a few days. It also grows a miniature devil inside the drinker, which makes the effect permanent if regurgitated and eaten. The extent to which this is Human Resources versus harnessing inchoate powers of chaos that happen to come in vaguely humanoid packages is, as with everything devil-powered, vague.
• In Latchkey Kingdom (which is set in the same world as 70-Seas above), Rex the castle guard and other hounds have Babel Finches (Rex's is named Woodstock) who translate their barks and growls into Inglish, which they can understand perfectly well but generally can't speak.
• In The Lydian Option, the Tha'Latta implant translators into prisoners, loaded with the languages of other species incarcerated in their prison.
• MegaTokyo: Tired how not understanding what Ping says, Largo jury-rigs a translation module for her. He gets it right on the second try, just in time to fix a misunderstanding between him and Junko the schoolgirl.
• In Not So Distant, many characters have Translators, but apparently the newer models have some trouble with things like names, and with not misinterpreting some things as obscene words (which they seem to have no problem rendering in different languages).
• In Red's Planet, a robot gives Red gibbervox, which lets her understand the aliens.
• The Erlkönig in Roommates probably has a translator spell, because Word of Ashe is that he never bothered learning other languages (he speaks in runes), but he can still understand and speak "English" when he wants to... in runic-looking letters.
• Sev Trek, an Australian sci-fi cartoon site, lampshades this trope with the Implausible Translator.
• Spoofed in the Sluggy Freelance story "It's the Wrong Torg, Grommit!". Riff brings in a auto-translator he made in junior-high to use it to communicate with an alternative-dimension Portuguese-speaking Torg, but it's actually just a cassette player that says things like "Riff is so cool! He's the coolest guy ever!"
  Riff: I forgot I had a self-esteem problem in junior-high.
• Spacetrawler has a language microchip that's implanted in a person's brain by a mechanical helmet. And since the human characters are all from different continents most of them need the chips just to understand each other.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: The Talking in Your Dreams system accessible to mages has this. Reynir spoke to Onni for the first time via this. This causes him to get slightly taken aback when hearing Onni's real-world Icelandic, which Onni himself has called "Some. Enough.", over the radio.
• Star Trip: Different languages are interpreted by universal translators in a person's ear. In the beginning of the story, Jas, a human from present-day Earth, didn't have one, instead being assisted by a telepathic fragment of the shapeshifter Khut which allowed her to understand the languages around her.
• Surviving the Game as a Barbarian: Whatever power transmigrates the protagonist into the universe of the game Dungeon and Stone also lets him speak and read the local languages — the latter actually giving him an advantage over his fellow Barbarians who Never Learned to Read.
• Tower of God: The Pocket multi-tools have a translator function so that everybody in the tower can understand each other. Since it's altogether several billion people, that is quite necessary.

• Discussed in Cracked, which calls translator microbes The 3rd Stupidest Way Movies Deal with Foreign Languages.

• QSMP: The Qlobal Translator mod functions as this; it is able to do voice recognition, and provide real-time translation into English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and other languages via subtitles.

• Adventure Time has "universal translator devices" worn around the neck, which are mostly seen being used by Rainicorns (who primarily speak Korean) to talk in English. The episode "My Two Favorite People" involves Jake giving one to his girlfriend Lady Rainicorn so Finn can better understand her, and in "Her Parents", Lady's parents each wear one when they visit Finn and Jake.
• Ben 10: All Plumbers' Badges, as well as the Omnitrix itself, have a built in Universal Translator, which is presumably why all of the aliens seem to speak English. The Ben 10: Omniverse episode "One Secret of Dos Santos" reveals that it even works on Earth languages like Spanish — or at least, it's supposed to. Sometimes it has to be activated manually, like for Galapagus in the Ben 10: Ultimate Alien episode "Escape from Aggregor". It also does not work on babies or extremely complex languages like Vulpimancers or Sotoraggians have. Universal Translators can also come as their own devices, like the one belonging to the Dragon in the Ben 10: Alien Force episode "Be-Knighted"; they're apparently Level 3 Technology.
• Danger Mouse: In "Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind", DM and Penfold are taken captive by an alien craft whose captain DM thinks is his enemy Baron Greenback. The alien captain speaks an alien language (DM: "I speak 47 languages fluently, but gibberish isn't one of them."), so it punches some buttons on a console and through it speaks normal English, or in his words, our more "primitive mode of speech."
• Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future: When the crew meet the peaceful Venusians, they introduce them to a fruit which can allow anyone who eats them to understand other languages.
• Elliott from Earth has a version of this as a rather notable part of the story and setting. On the Centrium, a multi-species city of refugees from across space, universal translation is provided by a substance in the air — "translation gas" — which is produced by special frog-like animals called babbledrogs. These animals (and the translation gas) aren’t just a background piece of worldbuilding; they later play an important role in setting up the overarching plot events of the season.
• Futurama:
  • Spoofed in "A Clone of My Own": Professor Farnsworth's Universal Translator can only translate into an "incomprehensible dead language", a Call-Back to the first episode where the people of France say the new year countdown in English.
    Cubert: Hello!
    Translator: Bonjour!
    Professor Farnsworth: Crazy gibberish!
  • Zapp Brannigan ends up using it to communicate with the Carcarons. It repeats his lines in the alien language rather than translating instantly and nobody questions why they're the first alien race in the universe that doesn't speak English.
• In Green Lantern: The Animated Series, one of the lantern ring's abilities is a universal translator. It continues to function as long as the ring has power, even when the rings are otherwise disabled. This leads to a hilarious scene in "Babel", where Hal, Kilowog, and eventually Razer's rings are all completely drained, forcing the trio to spend about half the episode speaking three different languages. Even the viewer is left without subtitles.
• Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures has Dr. Quest's "Language Translator" device, which Jessie uses in "Ice Will Burn".
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012): Subverted. In the Pilot, this seems to be the reason the Translation Convention is in effect whenever we see the animals from Blythe's perspective, since it isn't in effect until Blythe has an accident with the dumbwaiter and hits her head — but she says she can understand them, not hear them.
• The Octilans in Milo Murphy's Law have a translator embedded in their collars. The default setting is for food, so glitching causes words to be substituted with "eat", "devour", "buffet", et cetera.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • The Universal Mustache Translator in "The Chronicles of Meap" translates an alien language (comprised only of the word "Meap") to English; however, this is only for the English speakers' sake, as the aliens can apparently understand English. Leads to a well-done subversion of a Big "NO!" when instead of "NOOOOO!", it comes out as out as "MEEEEEEEEEEAP!".
  • In "Meapless in Seattle", Meap is shown to have a collection of back-up mustache translators, each of which gives him a different goofy accent. It also seems that only the space-faring individuals seem to understand English, because there's a scene where Meap gives a long Rousing Speech to his home planet that's met with confusion. He removes the mustache, states "meap", and gets the reaction he was looking for.
• Miraculous Ladybug: In the Miraculous World: Tokyo TV-special, because Marinette can't speak Japanese and having Tikki play Translator Buddy would cause its own problems, Tikki instead flies inside Marinette's ear, giving her the ability to instinctively speak and understand Japanese as long as Tikki stays there or she is transformed into Ladybug.
• When the Rainbow Brite characters meet an alien he has a hat with a translator installed in it.
• Razzberry Jazzberry Jam: In "Music Is Universal", Krupa gives Buddy the Talk Translator, a handheld device which can translate spoken language. Ironically for how such a device is usually used, the Talk Translator, being made on Earth, can't translate the Alien Castanets' speech (though this doesn't stop Buddy from pointing it at them and hoping it'll work this time.) At the end of the episode, the aliens upgrade it to be compatible with their language, allowing them to give the "thank you" that starts the Every Episode Ending.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle: Lampshaded and played with in the first "Peabody's Improbable History" episode. When Peabody first invents the WABAC, he and Sherman take it back to ancient Rome, where the meet a man speaking in Latin (and ignoring them). Peabody adjusts the machine, so that now they can hear the Roman speaking English; turns out he's a used chariot salesman (who is still ignoring them). Peabody makes one final adjustment, so that the historical characters they meet will interact with them. As Peabody puts it, "Not history as it was, but as it should have been."
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek: Lower Decks, the Cerritos gains the Tamarian Kayshon to temporarily replace Shaxs following his death at the end of the first season. He reveals that, since the Enterprise's encounter with the race, the Universal Translator has been updated to translate most of their metaphors into Federation Standard and he's even taken language courses to help mitigate the problem. However, like with the Klingons, the translator will miss one and not translate it properly. On the plus side, some of his fellow crewmates pick up on such things and will use it properly as well.
  • As in other Star Trek series, the universal translator is present in Star Trek: Prodigy, but it plays a much larger role in the plot. The series starts in a slave mining station where members of various alien races have been thrown together; since there's no translator and few of the aliens have common languages, the overseers don't have to worry about them planning any uprisings. Once Dal and Rok-Tahk find the Protostar and realize that its combadges provide instant translation, they can communicate and plan their escape.
• Tamagotchi Video Adventures starts with the Tamagotchis speaking an alien language before Mimitchi turns on a translation machine.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Starfire can learn a language by kissing a native speaker. Robin is, needless to say, depressed to hear that their random first kiss meant nothing. Additionally, in the movie, she also kisses a random Japanese boy to learn the language. This time, when she explains why, Robin's pretty relieved...
  • When Control Freak encounters Más and Menos, who only speak in Spanish, he promptly takes out his Universal Remote Control and changes their language settings to English. Naturally, this doesn't last beyond the episode.
• The Book from Time Warp Trio works like this, translating the main characters' English into whatever language it is the people in the time period/place they travel to speak. In one episode the translator function breaks down and they almost get killed due to not being able to speak Japanese and thus explain to the angry samurai what they're doing in his house.
• Trollhunters: The incantation etched in the Amulet, which is normally written in Troll-language, translates itself into English for Jim. Later on, the light emitted translates Troll-language into English and vice versa whenever Jim needs it.
• Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: Xavier's hoodie has a dial and antennae that translates for the group when they meet a non-English speaking historical figure.
• Young Justice (2010):
  • Blue Beetle has this as one of his many functions. Unusually for most examples, you can still hear the actual speech, the translation is just at a slightly higher volume.
  • Both Lobo and the aliens on Rimbor are shown speaking alien languages; when humans express confusion, they press a device that turns their speech into English.
  • Beings from New Genesis or Apokolips use Motherboxes and Fatherboxes to translate.
  • In "Downtime," Atlantean dialogue is first shown with subtitles, until Aquaman and Aqualad happen to swim by someone doing a translation spell, suddenly making them comprehensible to the audience. (It's not clear if Black Manta and his men were speaking English or Atlantean, though.)
  • When Dolphin is brought to Atlantis by Kaldur, he first has to cast a spell on her so that she can understand Atlantean as well as speak the language.

• One of the possible applications of wearable computing technology like Google Glass would be the ability for it to do voice recognition, and provide subtitles and even translated subtitles. Of course since no translator or voice recognition software is perfect yet...
• It's for written text, but the Google Translate mobile app can recognize text in video captured from your phone's camera and translate it, then insert the translated text back into the video, all in real time. Signs, menus, newspapers in every country become English, or whatever your native tongue is. (Based on an earlier app called Word Lens that Google acquired.)
• Microsoft is working on a Skype add-on that translates speech.
• Defictionalized by Game of War: Fire Age, a Mobile Phone Game mostly notable otherwise for its shameless use of Kate Upton. Its chat system features a real-time translator that supports over 30 languages. Whatever tongue your phone is set to, that's what you'll see everyone's messages in; it's done automatically, and in fact you have to mess with the game's Settings page to turn it off.