How to Build a Babel Fish

Douglas Adams introduced the magical concept of a ‘Babel fish’ in his legendary novel ‘The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ (1979).

The following paragraph, for those of you not in the know, is an explanation of what a Babel fish is, taken directly from his wonderful book:

“The Babel fish,” said The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic mix formed by combining the unconscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

The Babel fish, therefore. allowed Arthur Dent (the main character) to understand the language of alien life forms he encountered on his travels around the Universe.

Today, as I sat in my garden, enjoying the rare rays of hot English sunshine, drinking an ice cold beer and relaxing to the sound of our neighbours battling out heated screaming matches with their children, I realised that even humans, talking to other humans, living on the same part of the planet, speaking the same national language, even being part of the same family, could really make use of a Babel fish.

How is it that communicating with people we know can at times seem like we’re speaking completely different languages?

Why is it that some people can feel like their own siblings really are from another planet?

What happens when you think you’ve explained something perfectly well to your friend/colleague/parent/child or partner, and then they look at you perplexed, as though you’ve just grown two heads?

...

Find out the answers to these curious questions and more in a guest post by Anna Boswell (@aboswell, formerly @bozatron) later today on The Official Prose. Blog at: blog.theprose.com/blog.