Clarification On Language Barriers And Voice Commands

Published May 21, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Shat Nation,

First off, congrats to Big D for his first time hosting and to Kerri for her first instacast! You guys killed it.

Secondly, I’d like to try to clear up some of the confusion with language barriers and voice commands coming out of this episode. I’m basing this on common sense and what we’ve seen and heard in the show.

How Language is Supposed to Work:
According to Sizemore, all Hosts are multilingual. Their ability to understand and speak a variety of languages fluently and transition between them seamlessly is buried in their code. This makes sense. No Guest wants to be limited to which Park he or she can visit because of a language barrier. I’d love to go to Shogun World, but I only speak English. So we have Hosts switch to the language that they are being spoken to by Guests – problem solved. As seen with Hector, however, this is entirely subconscious. Hector cannot understand the samurai, but if a Japanese Guest tried talking to him when he was on his loop, Hector would speak Japanese fluently and not even realize it.

This also implies something further – as a part of their backstories, Hosts have a set of languages they believe they are limited to. Hector knows he speaks English and Lakota. Maeve, as part of her storyline, speaks 12 languages, including Japanese but not Lakota (as seen in her confrontation with Ghost Nation two episodes ago). Importantly, Maeve’s ability to speak Japanese this episode is entirely a product of her backstory, not her powers. Let’s call the languages that Hosts know they can speak their “Native Languages” from now on.

Post-Escalante Issues:
Sizemore explains that the fact that the samurai who capture Maeve and friends didn’t switch to English immediately upon hearing Sizemore speak means that the same glitch that happened in Westworld has spread to Shogun World. While we don’t know exactly what Ford’s “glitch” entailed in its entirety, we can at least infer that certain protocols relating to Guests (for example, don’t kill them) were switched off. It’s not illogical to think the Language Switching Protocol would be turned off as well, limiting Hosts’ linguistic abilities to only their Native Languages.

Voice Commands:
Here’s where the confusion sets in, but the bottom line is easy. Voice Commands do not normally need to be spoken in a Host’s Native Language. As people have pointed out, this would be stupid. Were this true, you couldn’t work as a tech in Shogun World unless you spoke fluent Japanese. Westworld would have to have a subset of staff who spoke fluent Lakota to do anything with Ghost Nation hosts. It makes no sense as a design choice.

Voice Commands are currently malfunctioning for two reasons.

The first is obvious – Voice Commands are offline for everyone except for Maeve. Indeed, Maeve is the only person, Human or Host, that successfully uses Voice Commands in Season 2. Sizemore fails to freeze the cannibal he was working on. Bernard and Dolores have used tablets as methods of control. But only Maeve has used Voice Commands.

Secondly, and most relevant to this topic, the Language Switching Protocol is down. Thus, when Maeve tries to tell the samurai to put his sword down, it doesn’t work, even though Maeve has Voice Command privileges. This is because the samurai only speaks Japanese as far as he knows; his ability to understand, speak, and respond to English is entirely a function of the language switching protocol, which is off. Sizemore tells Maeve she used the wrong language – English, instead of Japanese – but does this in the same breath as explaining that a glitch prevented the samurai from switching to English. In other words, Sizemore was saying “Your command should have worked in English, were it not for the glitch – guess you need to use Japanese.” Later in the episode, she does this with great success.

Interestingly, this has two “what-if” implications. First, if Sizemore’s cannibal were programmed to speak a Native Language that Maeve did not know, her Voice Command would likely not have worked and Sizemore would have been killed. Secondly, if Maeve knew Lakota, she theoretically could have ordered Ghost Nation to leave her alone with a Voice Command (unless something greater is at work with Ghost Nation that would have prevented them from obeying).

Cheers,

Ken L

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