skyjedi2005 said:Why do the Romulans and Klingons in some of the Star Trek films speak English they are Aliens, it should be alien dialogue with Translated text.
Only bad sci fi has the aliens speak English, even on Earth not everyone speaks English as their language
Obviously they do it to decomplicate things, coming up with alien languages, getting actors to speak them, remaining consistent, and having an extra character around to translate everytime a conversation is to take place between a human and an alien is a lot more difficult than just having everyone speak English.
Trek has at least tried to explain this away by using the in universe explanation of the universal translator, a device that translates everything in real time to the listeners language. For any H2G2 fans out there, basically a non biological version of the babelfish. Though ST has never remained consistent with this, as sometimes we will see Klingons speaking with subtitles and English speakers not understanding them, when clearly their translation device should be translating for them. ST:Enterprise focused much more on the linguistic aspects and dealt more with translations since the universal translator was not invented yet, or at least was not technology the humans possessed. I have not seen it myself, but I heard that there is an episode of DS9 where Quark and his family go back in time and crash in Rosewell, New Mexico, it is explained that because their translator is broken or because the humans don't have translators, or something along those lines, that the humans only hear gibberish when the Ferangi speak to them. Yeah, DS9 is known for some pretty over the top retarded episodes, but it is a citation of an episode that explains the translators at least.