Star Trek: 10 Episode Spoilers Hidden In The French Translation

This season two episode of Star Trek: Enterprise centres around the Temporal Cold War. In the teaser, the Enterprise finds a damaged vessel adrift in space with a human corpse inside – a complete mystery as no human is known to have reached this part of space.

The thrust of this episode relies, it could be argued, on dramatic irony: the audience knows more than the characters do. From all the Trek that had gone before, we are aware that time travel exists (and that you can beam things through time), what the high energy particles emitted by the craft are most likely to be, that humans have had babies with aliens, and even that future historians visit the past. T’Pol’s scepticism regarding the future origins of the vessel is most likely not meant to convince the viewer, therefore.

Indeed, the episode title in English clearly indicates (with a debatable use of wordplay) that time (travel) is involved somehow. It stops short, however, of telling us in what form. The French title, Le Vaisseau du futur [literally ‘The Vessel from the Future’], not only spoils the reveal of the opener – we know prior that there’s going to be a ship involved – it also tells us somewhat unequivocally when this ship is from and arguably denies the viewer the later disclosures of the occupant’s parentage and other mysteries of the episode. It also adds unnecessarily to the dramatic irony that is supposed to be embodied by T’Pol.