Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge, England, in 1952, The "Babel
fish" appears in his hilarious "trilogy" The Hitch Hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy It was first a British radio programme in 1978, which later
became a book and a television programme. It is a science fiction story about
an Englishman called Arthur Dent who gets on a spaceship just before the
Earth is destroyed, and the adventures he has in space with the other characters
on this spaceship. For intergalactic communication, a fish inserted in the
ear is used as an automatic translation device. Its function is explained
in the following passage, in which a speaking guide book provides the information.
- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A Trilogy
in Four Ports (London: Heinemann, 1987), 51ff.
"What's this fish doing
in my ear?"
"It's translating for you.
It's a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like."
He tossed over The Hitch
Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. [. ..]
"The Babel fish, " said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly,
"is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the
Universe. It feeds on brain wave 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 matrix
formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals
picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The
practical upshot of all 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. [...]
Meanwhile, the poor Babel
fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different
races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else
in the history of creation."
Babel (n.): the confusing sound of many voices talking
together - leech (n.): a small soft creature that fixes itself to
the skin of animals in order to drink their blood - carrier
(n.): something used for carrying something - unconscious
(adi.): unable to see, move, feel, etc. in the normal way because you are
not aware of it - nourish (v.): feed - excrete (v.) (formal)
to get rid of waste material from your body through your bowels, your skin,
etc. - telepathic matrix: a living substance
which sends out thoughts - upshot (n.): result