 | Babel Fish is a web-based application that automatically | |
| translates web pages. Learn more at Wikipedia. |
| Add the Babel Fish translation tool to your own website. | |
| Click here for more information. |
| Translate any website or block of text at the Yahoo! | |
| Babel Fish website. |
| Babel Fish gets its name from the cult radio play The | |
| Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (later a book, TV series, stage play, computer game, and movie - learn more at the BBC). The Babel Fish in the story is a small yellow fish that you put in your ear so you can understand anything in any language. |
- "The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, 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
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."
The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
| Watch a short video about the Babel Fish on the BBC | |
| website. |
| DOWNLOAD the BBC's Hitchiker's Guide Screensaver |
| The word Babel is a reference to the story of the Tower of | |
| Babel in the Bible. Read the story illustrated with Lego at The Brick Testament Recommended |
| The Tower of Babel story is available in many languages | |
| at Omniglot, including German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Maori, and many more, as well as several English versions, |
| A very long article about the Tower of Babel is available at | |
| Wikipedia |
 | The English verb (1) and noun (2) babble are derived | |
| from the story of the Tower of Babel: |
- "babble (babbles, babbling, babbles) 1. If someone
babbles, they talk in an excited way * Momma babbled
on and on about how he was ruining me... They all
babbled simultaneously... 'Er, hello, viewers,' he
babbled 2. You can refer to peoples voices as a babble
of sound when they are excited and confused, preventing
you from understanding what they are saying. * Kemp
knocked loudly so as to be heard above the high babble
of voices."
Collins Cobuild Advanced Learnerr's English Dictionary, 4th ed.,
2003
- More obviously, the English noun babel is derived from
the same source:
"babel If there is a babel of voices, you hear a lot of
people talking at the same time, so that you cannot
understand what they are saying. * ...a confused babel of
sound."
Collins Cobuild Advanced Learnerr's English Dictionary, 4th ed.,
2003
| _________________________ |
| _________________________ |
| _________________________ |
The Babel Fish
The Babel Fish in an ear
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder
(1563)
(1563)
"The Confusion of Tongues" by Gustave Doré (1865)
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