Doctor Who brain-breaker

[bktheirregular]

OK, so in Doctor Who, one of the fancy things the TARDIS does is handle translation at a sort of a subconscious level, so that the traveler is thinking in his or her native language but speaking in the local tongue.

How would it handle someone who's unevenly bilingual (i.e. fully fluent in one language, roughly fluent in another), dropped into a place where his or her second language is the local lingua franca?

Comments

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Probably say, "Oh dear, I'd never thought of that before," and explode in a puff of logic.

[bktheirregular]

Er, considering that apparently an exploding TARDIS could overwrite the entire universe, I'm thinking let's not try that.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

They tackled this in "The Masque of Mandragora," a Fourth Doctor episode. In it, the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith went back to Renaissance Italy. Sarah initially heard the language as English, but when she concentrated, she realized that everyone was speaking Italian...and that her own words sounded like Italian. IIRC, she said something about learning Italian in school but not really speaking Italian. She was slightly freaked about this until the Doctor explained it.

[bktheirregular]

Huh. I did not know that - then again, I've got basically no access to Classic Who over here, and I didn't really start following it until New Who began...