1. Travel is only possible backwards
2. Travel is only possible to prehistory
3. Being prehistorical, no known languages exist.

I need to have my protagonist be able to enter into dialog with 'natives' immediately, so I need some sf magic...a universal translator.

I'm thinking about some type of nanotechnology flim-flam, that I can introduce in a sentence. It's not a focus of the story at all, just a block to get past.

Any thoughts?

However, it is a very good idea for the time traveller to have a neuro-sybernetic interface with an implanted computer system. This would provide the ability to "record" language elements and "replay" them to augment natural language abilities, thus allowing the user to "learn" any phrase immediately. It would also be well if the system contained an extensive "knowledgebase" relevent to survival in a prehistoric setting as well as being linked to a nano-medical system to effectively prevent disease transmission (both ways, critical for a time traveller) or other mishap.

I would like to point out a couple of issues with your initial statements.

1. Time travel into the future is known to be possible Either cryogenics or relativistic time dialation both can transport a human any "distance" into the future.

2. Any time travel mechanism that could move a person into the past would logically make it just as possible to visit the near past as the distant past, so the only reason that travel to the near past would be "impossible" would be regulations prohibiting it. A regulation prohibiting only travel to the known past, while permitting travel to the distant past, would have to be based on the quite silly presumption that events in prehistory in no way affected or could affect those in history. This is, naturally, demonstrably false. If the human race is wiped out in prehistory, then all of history is affected dramatically.

These issues are, for purposes of your story, unimportant.

1. Your time traveller is interested in travelling back to prehistory for particular reasons.

Thanks for your comments.

For my story, complex immediate verbal interaction is required, no learning period, no language classes, no grunting.

I like the babblefish concept, but don't want to get sued

We're talking 'sf magic' here, in a sense. Just as an FTL drive is 'sf magic.'

It needs to be expressed in just a sentence or two, just to move the story along.

I say again, the only way to make a working "universal translator" of the sort you are talking about would involve some type of mind reader--a device capable of decompiling and translating at least the language and conceptual centers of a human brain. Any such device, however, could more easily be used to translate thoughts than natural language, since translating thoughts would be a logical requirement prior to translating speech.

I would go for having the traveler take on an overlay of memories and the proper appearance consistent with the destination. That would cover a multitude of problems.

I wrote a scene with four people who spoke different languages testing their brand new "Omniversal Translators." The four spoke English, Spanish, Hungarian, and French.

The English speaker says "Hello." His translator repeats it in the three other languages.

But at the same time, the other three translators are also translating "Hello." So the English translator hears Spanish, Hungarian, and French and dutifully repeats "Hello" three more times.

Meanwhile, the French translator is hearing Hungarian and Spanish, the Hungarian translator is hearing French and Spanish, the Spanish translator is hearing Hungarian and French . . .

Thus, the moment the first word was uttered in any language, the Universal Translators would all start babbling furiously to each other, making communication impossible.

It was a very funny scene. Imagine "Turn off the #%&$ing Omniversal Translators!" screamed over and over in four different languages . . .

It is not a terribly difficult difficulty to over come, however. All the translator need do is focus the output to the intended recipients. This is not actually impossible, like extrapolating the meaning (and precise usage) of terms not previously encountered, a commonplace of "Universal Translators".

i'm assuming you have a pretty good reason time travel can only occur backwards, so a word of caution if you take Survivor's advice (about setting up pseudorocks and letting them get to the future the old-fashioned way) at the moment, we don't have any information-storing technology that could save information for such a long period of time. so if you do that, the easiest way to go about it (i can see chad_parish cringing at this one) is to make up some new alloy or new method or whatnot that could stand the test of time and don't get into details.

what's wrong with telepathy? what if people sent out a non-verbal "gist" of what they were speaking as some form of electromagnetic radiation, but for one reason or another, mankind's receptive center for it wasn't as developed? then, you could have some sort of nanotechnology boost it in your protagonist pre-trip and voila! he knows exactly what the natives are trying to say. obviously, this wouldn't work both ways. it would be interesting to read about him trying to get his own messages across, i think, but if you must have two-way communication, then i suggest some sort of nanoprobe that could be injected into the natives.

anyway, just mtc. i'm interested to see how this turns out.

TTFN & lol

The biggest problem would be a storage media -- how do you save data for that long? CD-ROMs are gauranteed for 100 years, I think... magnetic media for a lot less. You'd almost have to engrave it, and then prevent the decay of the engraved material.

TTFN & lol

...and as the primitive beings talked, the computer-rock hummed to itself. Deep within its bowels it recorded the grunts and gestures of the people and deciphered their meaning. for years it worked until, one day, it was gone. slinking away in the night, it found its way across hill and stream and valley and journeyed all the way to the cave. there, using the dexterity given to all computer-rocks, it scrawled upon the walls one of first languages of man. and thus, the dictionary was born....

{sigh} okay, i'm done.

TTFN & lol

Cosmi

I was actually thinking more along the lines of encoding the information in a strand of DNA and replicating it a few billion times (hence my nanotechnology referance). The referance to early human information technologies was...just to point out that there was no insuperable theoretical barrier, I guess.

TTFN & ?

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actually, it was the lack of detail i didn't think you'd like...

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Which brings up a point for all you "hard" SF writers out there. Don't ever "justify" anything more than the science that your story absolutely depends on.

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The author should work out all the details of the super-long lived metal, or whatever, to several decimal places. He should also, however, only put a comment such as "derived from nuclear-storage-vault technology" in the actual text.

It should be JUSTIFIABLE, but only subject the reader to enough data to convince him that you HAVE justified it.

Example: English speaker says "hello" and wishes to translate to German. In German, though, you don't say "hello": You say "good day" or "good evening." Thus the translator has to pick a roughly approximate phrase as the closest match, and the translated phrase doesn't have the exact meaning of the original. If the translator says "good day," the German-speaker could respond "We don't use your system of timekeeping; it's not day yet for us." (Wir benutzen nicht deine ...) This wouldn't make any sense to the English speaker when it was translated back.

This given that the languages are not only between members of the same species at the same moment in history, but also given that English is largely *based* on Germanic languages. They're very close. Languages spoken by completely different kinds of beings, from different environments and different cultures, might in many cases be virtually untranslatable -- and certainly not immediately translatable into easily-understood English concepts.

OK, I'll stop myself there and do a complete 180. I think a universal translator of the kind you're talking about *is* theoretically possible. Since knowledge is stored in the brain electrically, language is bound to be encoded in specific constructs that, if we understood the brain incredibly well, we could decode. So your universal translator scans the brain of a local with some sort of near-distance neuroscanner, deciphers the language constructs it finds, and either does instant gratification cybernetic learning or else acts as an interpreter -- in which latter case it would do not only a translation, but also provide explanations where necessary. For instance, if the person says "I would like to eat your family," the translator might mention that this culture believes you gain the strengths of those you eat, and that the person is complimenting your family by saying they'd be worth eating.

As to being able to travel to prehistory and not historical periods, this seems a little arbitrary to me, but it could be justified. Consider the analogy of the catapult: It can't fire at a target five feet away, but it can be used to lob across a battlefield. Machines can have all kinds of limitations based on their conditions.

All this said, I always feel slightly annoyed when a story skips over important considerations of the situation (like the language barrier) to get to what the writer wants to write. If the character gets into the far distant past and is immediately able to understand the residents of that time, I first need to be convinced that's possible (or else I'm disgusted with the story because it has a gaping logical hole in it, unless I'm willing to ignore that because I am loving the other elements of the story so much -- not something that it's a good idea to bet on even if the other elements of the story are absolutely wonderful), and then might still be disappointed because we've skipped something that might have been interesting and made it dull. Again, I probably wouldn't care too much if I were greatly wrapped up in the rest of the story.

Hope this is helpful. And please remember that in physics, the limit of the speed of light isn't just a good idea: it's the law.