What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures

Science fiction is full of miraculous technology. You've got instantaneous teleportation across great distances, time travel, faster-than-light starships, cryogenic suspension that lasts centuries, and so on. But one of the most fascinating science fiction tropes is the universal translator. (Or, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel fish.)

On one level, the universal translator seems like no big deal. After all, Google can now translate dozens of different languages into English with r...