Hoshi Sato is one of the characters in the latest series of the Star Trek saga, Enterprise. Enterprise is set a century before Captain Kirk's era, and represents a time when space travel is new. To communicate with the aliens that they meet, they will need a communications officer with a gift for languages. This person is Hoshi Sato, an exolinguist with a gift for learning languages (both human and alien): she already speaks 38 of them as the series begins.

Hoshi Sato, portrayed by actress Linda Park, is a realistically written academic linguist. We first see her ("Broken Bow") teaching some exotic alien language to students in Brazil. When Captain Jonathan Archer comes to tell his communcations officer that the mission is starting early, she is reluctant to leave her students. But Archer lures her with a tape of a language no human has ever heard before: Klingon. Faced with the opportunity to be the first linguist to describe Klingon, she joins the mission. However, like any good ivory-tower academic, Ensign Sato is leery of the "real world". She worries about the ship as it accelerates to Warp 5, prefers not to join landing parties, cannot sleep on the "wrong" side of the ship (the stars are moving in the wrong direction), and in general is uneasy about being part of the mission. At her first opportunity to save the ship by speaking to a potentially hostile ship after she has learned the rudiments of their language, she does what any good academic would do faced with the same situation: she obsesses about her imperfect knowledge of the language. Eventually, of course, she saves the day ("Fight or Flight"). As time goes on, she becomes more comfortable with serving on the Enterprise.

Needless to say, I am jealous of Hoshi Sato!