Will real Russians talk like that?

In a new special feature for the Star Trek Genesis trilogy, actor Walter Koenig complains that the self-proclaimed experts on the Internet consider the accent for his character (Pavel Chekhov) to be not only overdone but also unrealistic. (See "Pavel Chekhov's Screen Moments" in Disc 3 of the new set, the one for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). Those nitpickers claim to have Russian friends who don't talk one bit like Chekhov. The problem is that those nitpickers have temporarily forgotten that Star Trek takes place in the future. A lot can happen to a language in forty years, not to mention 300 years. However, we're not going to let Walter Koenig off that easy. After we identify and distance ourselves from our attachment to the present, you'll see that there are still many nits to be had with this topic.

Let's stay in the present for a while, though. Where does a Russian learn English? There are classes in Moscow, I'm sure, but the disadvantage would be that there's little use for English beyond the classroom. London is perhaps the closest option for immersion learning of the English language. (Alaska is almost twice as far from Moscow as London is, though it is possible for our Russian to come from a place that is much closer to Alaska). Much of Canada and the lower 48 States are also present viable options for a Russian to learn English by immersion.

And let's face it, English is a difficult language to learn after childhood, it really requires immersion in a place where it is spoken for all every day necessities. Those of us who were born to an English-speaking family take for granted our skill making sense of all those letter combinations that sound one way in one context and a completely different way in a context that's only slightly different! Of course we also find learning other languages difficult. Russian uses a completely different alphabet, and Japanese uses four different sets of characters, one of which contains over 4,000 characters! If only there was a way we could just talk to anyone regardless of their language, with some magical device automatically taking care of translating what we say and what is said to us so that everyone understands the whole conversation.

As it happens, precisely such a device exists in the fictional universe inhabited by the Star Trek characters! It's called the universal translator. You don't have to believe that such a device could possibly be constructed in real life to accept it while watching Star Trek. So why exactly does Chekhov have to learn English to serve in Starfleet? I don't suppose they made Spock learn English either. Well, maybe Chekhov wanted to. By the time Chekhov joined Starfleet, the universal translator was true and tested technology. The very first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise shows an universal translator quickly getting up to speed in its understanding of the Klingon language. One would think that Earth's known languages would be piece of cake for the device. Since Leonard Nimoy does not put on a Vulcan accent for Spock, Walter Koenig seems to have very little reason to put on a Russian accent, even if it turns out that in the 23rd Century Russians who learn English really do talk like that.

There is one Chekhov moment in the new Star Trek film that still rings false for me, even though the rest of the audience laughed: Chekhov (now played by Anton Yelchin, supposedly a "real Russian") enters his voice authorization code for the Enterprise but the computer is confused because he says "Weektor" instead of "Victor." Maybe the authorization code is in English. But if the computer knows enough to recognize Chekhov's voice as that belonging to an authorized user, shouldn't it also know about Chekhov's linguistic oddities?

(A little side note on Koenig and Yelchin: according to the IMDb, both actors have spent the vast majority of their lives in America).