Star Trek: 10 Episode Spoilers Hidden In The French Translation

In this season six episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the crew of The Enterprise-D (and presumably Picard’s ready room fish and Spot) must evacuate to Arkaria base for the ship to undergo a baryon sweep. Whilst Data and Commander Hutchinson engage in conversation that would make anyone long for one of The Voyager Doctor’s holographic essays, Picard quickly returns to the ship only to find a band of mercenaries intent on stealing trilithium resin. Trapped, Picard enters a cat-and-mouse, life-and-death game with the intruders and the baryon sweep.

The English title of this episode provides all sorts of headaches in translation; the archaic use of the possessive ‘mine’ after the noun presumably doubles up as a noun itself in reference to the extraction of extremely volatile trilithium resin from the warp core. This rather specific wordplay is simply impossible to replicate in French. Given this difficulty, the translator chose the more descriptive ‘Vingt-huit minutes pour vivre’ [literally ‘Twenty-eight Minutes to Live’]. This is certainly accurate, but it tells us in advance that at least one person is going to have to battle to stay alive.

This is by no means a major spoiler as any number of characters is in mortal danger during this episode. The French title does, however, impose a different tone from the get-go than the rather more cryptic English original. The French first-time viewer might well have been decidedly less surprised by the sudden hostage situation on Arkaria base and by Picard’s brush with death.