I was thinking about the reason why the Universal translator sometimes does not convert forigen languages to Federation standard(English), often explained away by IRTS (IT read the script). Perhaps the individual UTs implanted in the ear like the Ferengi in "Little Green Men" are set to only convert words spoken in the user's native tounge, and everything else comes out phonetically as it is said. For example, when Dax said the Klingon word for "Iceman" in "Blood Oath", she actually said that word in Klingon, then said "Iceman" in her native Trill language, or whatever she regularlly speaks. So anytime she actually says a word in a foriegn language and not her own, it comes out untranslated. It kind of makes sense that way to enable flavorfull conversation. One could curse an alien in their foriegn tounge. There are many situations that no doubt require additional rationalization for this to work but I think this covers a lot of the oddities of IRTS. What do you think?

That seems to make sense to me... or at least as close as you're going to get to a "sensible" explanation of the UT.

Actually, there are 1,000,000 tiny little people living inside the Universal Translator. Each one can speak a different alien language.