“I once knew a high-level operative who was quite offended being called a ‘translator’. He scoffingly suggested that any idiot who could speak two languages was a translator, but he worked for the government as an Interpretor, a completely different species. This makes perfect sense as the great bulk of communication between humans is nonlinguistic and is difficult to read across cultures. Matter of fact, for some it is difficult to read the nonverbal cues of their own culture, so for them picking up the nonverbal cues of an alien culture would be nearly impossible.”

— an anonymous informant (JWR)