SCIFI.COM - Farscape

When I first arrived on Moya, the DRDs injected me with a syringe full of translator microbes.

The explanation I got from his eminence Rygel was that "translator microbes colonize at the base of the brain and allow us to understand each other." Considering Rygel's "winning" personality, sometimes I wish the translator microbes weren't so good at their job.

The tiny tyrant went on to point out that everyone is injected with the microbes at birth. Everyone but primitive life forms like me, that is. You [ MICROBES ]

could think of them as a universal vaccine against language barriers - a sort of "fluency flu."

As good as the little guys are, though, they don't always catch everything. Sometimes words slip through that are untranslatable. Things like proper names, unique customs, and swear words. Especially swear words!

For instance, when D'Argo heats up I'm sure he has a mouth like a drunken sailor. But my microbes never manage to translate his actual words. All I hear are growls, grunts, and a few random syllables. It has the unintended effectd of turning all my conversations PG-13, as if I've got my own built-in V-chip. Great, I've landed in Mister Rogers' Galaxy.

When it comes right down to it, though, I guess these little germs are the only thing holding us together. It's hard enough for me to roll my R's in Spanish -- I'm not sure I even have the right number of vocal chords to speak Luxan. If it weren't for that injection, I'd probably still be trying to learn how to say "J.C. phone home" in Sebacean.