Any credible contact regime will create tension between translation teams and containment councils almost immediately.
Translation teams are rewarded for access, context, and iterative interpretation. Containment councils are rewarded for restricting spread, controlling procedure, and slowing down assumptions that could travel faster than evidence. Those incentives are not symmetrical, and they will compete even when both groups agree on the need for caution.
This matters because first contact will not unfold only as a decoding problem. It will unfold as a contest over institutional tempo. One side will argue that delayed interpretation wastes meaning. The other will argue that uncontrolled interpretation manufactures it.
The early architecture of response may therefore be shaped less by the signal itself than by which body gets to define the acceptable speed of understanding.