One thing I love about Murderbot that I don’t see talked about much is how it literally translates everything it hears. I think it’s easiest to notice with swears. This is most obvious in Fugitive Telemetry with the crew of the Lalow. They say things like “that picker” and “penis move” and “pussing corporates,” some of which confuse even the Preservation humans. But it does it all the time.
In System Collapse, Tarik says “motherless” (as opposed to something like motherfucking) and the BE corporates say things like “lame-skulled” and while you could think those are just futuristic insults as a result of linguistic drift (which they could also be), I think they’re just literal translations. It becomes more noticeable when you see how religious terms are rendered: “oh high one! Oh deity!” Which is like…sure. They could literally be saying that. But imo it makes more sense if MB is translating something they’re saying in another language.*
I think the most notable case of this is when Thiago calls Amena “my daughter.” On first read I literally thought it was just a Preservation thing but then I realized it made a lot more sense to me (a 21st century American) if he was saying something like mija but MB was just literally translating it into its archive bc that’s how it processes language.
This is also the reason for Amena’s use of Second Mom and Third Mom. It sounds kind of clunky in English but Chinese does a similar thing which sounds perfectly natural in that language (e.g. da-ge, er-ge, san-ge for first/oldest brother, second (oldest) brother, and third (oldest) brother).
Anyway! It’s a fun little detail I really enjoy about MB. There are definitely way more examples but I didn’t have time to track them all down.
*Don’t ask me which languages. Linguistic drift ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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