#universal translator

like for example how quark pronounces human "hyoo-mon"

presumably quark is not speaking standard which means that we the audience are hearing his dialogue as filtered through the universal translator, and assuming also that the universal translator can deal with different accents -- so the same word pronounced in two different accents gets translated the same way

why does the translator preserve that mispronunciation?

Like if I say "1 hour" it's gotta be changing it to like "0.87 bajoran theda" or whatever.

When he gets home, he finds Keiko and Molly are hosting Julian, Jake and Ziyal - which isn't so unusual: their little drawing club meets up on a semi-regular basis. What he's not expecting is for them all to be chatting in Bajoran amongst themselves, or for Molly to greet him with a shout of a word he does know means "Daddy!", followed by a string of unintelligible syllables seemingly directed at Ziyal. He's so surprised, he just smiles at her and tells her how lovely the drawing is, and as he puts his things away listens to their lively conversation continue. He didn't even know Julian and Jake spoke Bajoran well, let alone this fluently!

But clearly, none of them have noticed the problem with the UT, or if they have, they haven't remembered that their all-Bajoran workaround wouldn't incude Miles. But he'd rather not intrude - Julian and Jake and Ziyal will probably head off soon, anyway - and it's kind of relaxing, in its own way, he finds, letting the wave of language wash over him in a way he couldn't back in Ops.

For people rightfully concerned about big tech perpetuating literacy crisis via AI summaries and the like... please don't forget about the monolingualism crisis. Making people rely on machine translation instead of letting them learn foreign languages or giving job to professional translators is another facet of the same fascist project. And companies like Google are accelerating it at the speed of light by FORCING it on us via AI bullshit like auto-dubs which nobody asked for and setting them as default if your IP is not in the anglosphere. I have to stay vigilant about my apps resetting back to Polish unprompted, sometimes even when I set my entire device UI to English. YouTube keeps condescendingly assuming I need everything translated to my first language, no matter that most things I watched over the 20 years of its existence were in English.

Please read this Jack Morton short speculative story for an idea of how letting capitalism run the universal translator would influence the society. And in case you can't read-read right now, I got you covered with Margaret Killjoy doing audio version on her podcast (brisk 28 minutes):