Sort of going off on a tangent here, but there's something that's been bothering me about Star Trek (all series), in regards to "bad dubbing".

OK, so I get that all aliens speak English because of a Universal Translator or whatever. They're not *actually* speaking English, but the computer matrix translates whatever they say, in real-time, so the rest of the Federation crew (and we the audience) can understand what's being said. I accept this. But what about *their mouths*? The computer might translate what they're saying, but surely their mouth movements would still sync up with their native Klingon or Vulcan or Bajoran or whatever. Shouldn't every non-Earthling (with the possible exceptions of Spock, who was half-human, and Worf, who was raised by humans) talk like a character out of a bad kung fu movie?

What gives?

English is the interstellar trade language, you either know it or you're at war with the Federation. Even Cardassian replicators have human food programs, because they lost.

If every alien knows and speaks English, then what is the point of a Universal Translator? And if a Universal Translator exists, then what is the point of learning and using English as a "trade language"? Sounds like highly improbable, speculative fanon to me!

And anyway, even if it were true that all of these various aliens were really speaking English, what about aliens who could not possibly know English? Like the Skrreea? DS9 episode 2x10 quite clearly establishes that they had no knowledge of English and were speaking their own bizarre space-babble. At the very least, THOSE aliens should have been speaking like kung fu film actors. Yet they were not.

That's what the Federation wanted the Skrreea to believe. It's like in Dune how the Emperor seeded their made up hokey space Christianity on every world they wanted to conquer and lo, here comes their messiah. On rare occasions in Star Trek the translator gets an actual workout, and when it does it's obvious it's never used anywhere else it says it is.

Do you really think Romulans called themselves after Roman mythology?

Also, why would ENGLISH be the trade language? Humans don't engage in trade! Or if they do, it's on a very limited scale, and it's only condoned on the fringes of their society. Federation economics are profoundly communo-mercantilistic; even highly educated officers like Riker have no clue what money is, and the Federation's open disdain and hatred for all things *trade* rivals that of the Jew-hating, medieval Christian nobility!

If any race was going to set the standard for an interstellar trade language, it'd be the Ferengi, not the humans.

The latter seasons of DS9 destroy utterly every utopian thing ever established in Star Trek.

I'm mostly fine with this because awhile back I decided that everyone in the Federation was actually speaking Chinese but what really got me this time was some the idioms the aliems use.