One detail we often tacitly accept in
science fiction is a common language. From Star Wars to Star Trek,
very little attention is ever given to the likelihood that aliens
will have a completely different language than ours. Often, this is
bypassed in scifi by technology—since we're already imagining
things far in the future, it's not a stretch to imagine that a
universal translator exists, such as the babel fish from Doublas
Adam's “Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.” We'd much rather get
right to the story than be distracted by barriers to the story such
as a realistic language problem. I faced this problem very briefly a
few years ago when writing a Solar Echoes novel, but because the time
context was during an era where all the aliens had met and were in an
established alliance through the Interstellar Union, it made sense
that they would have all found a universal language to speak, which
is conveniently called, “Universal.” However, the time context of
the story in the visual novel, The Star Legation, presented a more
difficult language problem...
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