De acordo com uma entrevista com Star Trek Magazine, o co-escritor do programa Joe Menosky teve a idéia de uma linguagem baseada em metáfora a partir de dois conceitos-chave; as noções linguísticas de John Ciardi (que cada palavra tem uma etimologia histórica que deve ser entendida antes que um tradutor possa traduzir com precisão um trabalho para outro idioma) e o "taquigrafia imagística"usado no discurso e nos escritos em chinês antigo (onde frases curtas são usadas, transmitem significado incompreensível para pessoas que não foram educadas para entender o que o orador está fazendo alusão)1)
Change of direction
“Fortunately, Michael went off to see ‘Dances With Wolves’ and came back to the office completely taken by the scene of Kevin Costner and the Native American by the fire, where they try to communicate with each other. He told me he wanted, ‘Two people, on a planet; they don’t speak the same language, but after a great struggle they finally break through to understanding.’ And I said, ‘I can do that.’ So I threw out the original script, kept the title and came up with the story Michael wanted. If he had not seen 'Dances With Wolves’ that weekend, ‘Darmok’ would never have reached the screen, and I may well have been out of a job.”
One of Joe’s first practical problems was developing a form of language that Picard wouldn’t be able to understand. In STAR TREK the crew happily travel around the Galaxy encountering countless races who appear to speak English; this is explained away by the use of the universal translator an almost magical device that can instantaneously translate any language. Somehow, Joe’s aliens would need to speak a language that baffled the technology.
“Our understanding of the universal translator at the time was pretty vague,” he says. “No episode had unambiguously established what was going on, and nobody on the staff had it worked out. I assumed it used a vast database, with hundreds of thousands of languages and some sophisticated knowledge of deep grammatical structures common to all humanoid life forms.
“The problem I had in terms of story was that I wanted Picard and Dathon to actually speak to each other, rather than try to communicate through gestures or miming. But what the alien was saying had to be meaningless to Picard, or else the story Michael wanted me to tell could not happen. I needed an informing concept. The poet and translator of Dante, John Ciardi, once wrote ‘every word is a poem’ 2 - meaning that if you look into the history of any word you will always get back to a metaphorical image.
“I combined that notion with the kind of imagistic shorthand sometimes used in ancient China: like ‘Viscount Yi.’ If you don’t know that Yi was a minister at the court of a madman and what he did to survive, then you don’t know what that phrase is supposed to convey. So that was the scheme I came up with; the Tamarians speak exclusively in metaphoric shorthand, based on their own history and their own myths. And if you don’t know those stories then you don’t know what they are trying to say, even if you understand each word in isolation, which is all the UT could give you.”
Star Trek Magazine: December 2002 Volume 3 Issue 8
1 - Da mesma maneira que da tradição ocidental pode dizer "é a caixa de Pandora"aludir a uma situação com conseqüências desconhecidas, mas quase certamente ruins, fazendo referência a Trabalhos e Dias.
2 - Tecnicamente falando, Ciardi disse "toda palavra é na raiz uma imagem, e imagens poéticas devem ser feitas de palavras" não "toda palavra é um poema"mas o significado é basicamente o mesmo.